


Immortālēs Tempī

by fallintosanity (yopumpkinhead)



Category: Final Fantasy XV
Genre: Action/Adventure, Blood and Injury, Brotherhood, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-24
Updated: 2019-02-24
Packaged: 2019-11-04 19:09:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 7
Words: 25,443
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17903867
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yopumpkinhead/pseuds/fallintosanity
Summary: When Cor disappears while on a mission to destroy an Imperial base, Noctis and his retinue go searching for him. But the Cor they find is quite different from the one they're expecting.(aka, this is not your standard FFXV time-travel fic)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nirejseki](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nirejseki/gifts).



> This is a FTH 2018 fic for the endlessly patient and forgiving nirejseki. They asked for "a fic where [Cor] gets de-aged or a younger version of him is pulled in from a near timeline or something and Noctis&Co. have to deal with angry-and-excitable-but-really-freaking-talented 16-year-old Cor". The resulting fic has been an absolute blast to write - I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it!
> 
> Enormous thanks to my betas Lunin and AgeofZero. Any remaining mistakes are mine.

“Whoa,” Prompto said in an awed whisper. “Iris wasn't kidding.”

“She may be a kid, but she doesn’t exaggerate,” Gladio said, though his tone suggested he was as impressed by the sight below them as Prompto.

“So Cor’s down there somewhere?” Prompto asked, and shook his head in amazement.

Noctis and his friends were stretched out on their stomachs on a low cliff in southern Duscae, hidden in a dense copse of bushes and trees. They’d left their chocobo mounts nearly a mile back, which at the time Noctis had thought was Ignis being overcautious, but now he was grateful for. Below them was a shallow valley packed to the brim with Imperial transports, mining equipment, makeshift barracks, and Magitek storage units. MTs marched on patrol or stood at patient attention on the perimeter, their red eyes gleaming ominously in the early-morning light. In the middle of it all was a deep pit, its edges lined with scaffolding, pulleys, and floodlights which did absolutely nothing to banish the darkness at its center.

Iris had called Gladio yesterday to tell them Cor had gone to scout an Imperial construction site. Cor thought they might be planning another base and wanted to head them off, but that had been three days ago and Iris hadn’t heard from him since. She’d tried to sound casual, but Noctis had been able to hear the worry in her voice over the speakerphone.

“Cor isn’t crazy enough to take on this many Imperials at once,” Noctis pointed out. He was impressed by the base, too, and maybe more than a little intimidated. They’d broken into Imperial bases before, but it had never gone well for them. And judging by the number of Magitek storage crates lining the edges of the site, this place was better protected than any of those bases.

“Ah, but that begs the question,” Ignis cut in. “Where _are_ all the Imperials?”

Noctis blinked. That… was a very good question, actually. The site was full of _equipment_ , but no people, unless you counted the MTs around the edges. “...Huh,” he muttered.

“Think Cor did it?” Prompto said. “Snuck into the middle of the base and took them all out from the inside?”

Gladio shook his head. “Those MTs wouldn’t be on patrol if he had.”

“Maybe he’s still in there,” Prompto suggested. “Still working his way out.”

“No,” Ignis said. “The Marshal is an excellent fighter, but he’s no assassin. _Someone_ would have noticed and sounded an alarm.”

“But then…” Prompto said. “Where did everybody go?”

Noctis glanced at Ignis, then Gladio, his own unease mirrored in his friends’ expressions. But Noct was the prince, and they were waiting for his word. He scooted back until he was out of sight of the MTs below, and got to his feet. “Let’s find out.”

***

It didn’t take long to clear a path through the MT patrol around the dig site’s perimeter. MTs were only as smart as the humans who’d programmed them, and these had clearly been programmed to maintain their patrol rather than ganging up on any intruders. Ignis speculated they were meant to sound a silent alarm to the human soldiers who should have been guarding the rest of the site, but that only brought them back to the question of where those human soldiers had vanished to.

“Maybe they fell in?” Prompto suggested, as they stood at the top of the ramp which led down into the pit. “The scaffolding broke and they’re all stuck down there. Or the pit caved in.”

“I hope not,” Noctis said dryly, and elbowed him.

“Be pretty bad for us,” Gladio agreed. “But I don’t think so.” When Noctis and Prompto both looked up at him, he tapped a finger to his ear. “Too quiet. If a base’s worth of Niffs was stuck down there, they’d be making a hell of a racket.”

“What if it’s really deep?” Prompto asked. “Like, so deep we can’t hear them.”

“Unlikely, but either way we won’t know unless we go down ourselves,” Ignis said pointedly.

“Yeah,” Noctis said. He started forward, stepping cautiously on the wooden planks of the ramp. They felt sturdy enough, but Prompto’s talk about falling made him uneasy.

“Are you sure that’s a good idea?” Prompto said. His voice had gone high-pitched and nervous, and Noctis remembered how claustrophobic he was. The mouth of the pit was only about fifteen or twenty feet across, and even the combined efforts of the morning sun and the floodlights did little to penetrate the shadows swallowing the ramp as it wound back and forth down the side.

“It’ll be fine,” Noctis said, and turned to give him what he hoped was a reassuring grin. “Can’t be any worse than going down into Costlemark or Steyliff.”

Prompto sputtered. “Are you _kidding_?! Do you _remember_ the daemons we fought down there?” He kept talking, a steady stream of chatter about how miserable it had been to fight the quetzalcoatl and the jabberwock - but he followed Noctis down the ramp. Gladio shook his head in amusement, hurrying forward to get ahead of Noct, while Ignis brought up the rear, glancing periodically over his shoulder.

The ramp wound around the sides of the pit, tilted downward at a sharp angle Noctis knew would be hell on his legs and back when they had to climb out. The pit gradually widened as they went lower, each subsequent turn of the ramp going further and further out from the center. The light from above rapidly faded, replaced with intermittent floodlamps whose light seemed to struggle against the weight of the darkness in the pit’s depths. Occasionally they passed carvings on the wall, alien letters and symbols which glowed with a faint light of their own.

Noctis ran his fingers along one of them, feeling the magic throbbing within. It trickled through his fingers into his body, radiating gently along his spine, sending tingles through his limbs. “It’s old,” he whispered, and only then realized Prompto had fallen silent. The pit had a weight to it, a sense of age and things long forgotten. “It’s like Costlemark,” he added.

“A Solheim ruin, then,” Ignis said thoughtfully. He came up beside Noctis and studied the carvings, though Noctis noticed he didn’t try to touch them.

“So the Imperials started building a base and tripped over an old ruin instead,” Gladio said.

Ignis shook his head. “It’s more likely this was their goal all along. The Empire has always been fascinated by Solheim technology. Perhaps too fascinated.”

“If this was their goal, what do you think is down here?” Prompto asked. His eyes were wide in the glow of their flashlights, and he eased closer to Noctis, rubbing his bare arms nervously.

“More importantly,” Gladio added, “is it what made them all vanish?”

Nobody had an answer to that. Noctis suppressed a shiver and turned away from the wall. It was surprisingly hard to make himself let go of the carvings; the magic coursing through them tugged at his own magic, and he ended up brushing one hand along the wall as they headed deeper into the pit.

They were easily three hundred feet below the surface, the opening of the pit little more than a faint dot high overhead, before the constructed platforms ended and they found themselves standing on a surface of old, pitted, but clearly carved stone. Gladio knelt, fingers tracing a line across the stone where mortar had probably once sat, and which now was full of dirt. “Footprints,” he announced, his voice muted. The air in the pit had an oppressive weight, like trying to breathe under a heavy blanket. “A lot of footprints.”

“All these footprints, but no Imperials to show for it,” Ignis muttered. “I don’t like this.”

“Me, neither,” Prompto said fervently. “Are we sure Cor’s down here? Maybe he killed all the Imperials but his phone got damaged and we passed him on the road.”

Noctis raised an eyebrow at him.

Prompto glared. “What?” he demanded. “It could happen!”

“If Cor killed all the Imperials,” Noctis pointed out, “where are all the bodies?”

Prompto shuddered. “Dead bodies. Great. Now I’m thinking about _ghosts_. Do you hate me or something?”

Noctis grinned and thumped him on the arm. “You know it.” He turned to Ignis, who had crouched beside an opening in the floor near the opposite wall. “Specs, what’s up?”

“This goes further down,” Ignis said. “And I think I hear something.”

Noctis hurried to join him, Gladio and Prompto on his heels. The hole in the floor was a few feet across, roughly square; from the crumbling stone on one edge it had probably once been an opening for a staircase. A modern ladder had been attached to the opposite edge, descending further into darkness. They all fell silent, listening, and after a moment Noctis heard what Ignis had - a faint, distant shout, followed almost immediately by a low heavy _thump_.

“That’s a person,” Noctis said, startled.

“Shouting for help?” Prompto asked.

“Maybe there’s something to your cave-in theory after all,” Gladio said. “Let’s go.” He swung his legs over the edge and slid down the ladder into the hole.

“Man, he makes everything look easy,” Prompto grumbled as he followed.

“If you put as much time and effort into training as Gladio has, you’d make things look easy, too,” Ignis retorted. He nudged Noctis to go next, and Noct eased himself onto the ladder, careful not to step on Prompto’s fingers. Ignis brought up the rear, his body blocking what little light filtered through the hole, so the only illumination was their jacket lights. Bands of light and shadow swung nauseatingly against the walls as they descended, and Noctis was glad when they’d all reached the floor and the lighting stabilized.

This lower room was smaller than the one above, but its ceiling and the tall door on the far wall were both arched, reminding Noctis of the receiving rooms and foyers in the Citadel. A modern Imperial generator sat in one corner, chugging quietly, the sound eerie and too loud in the oppressive silence. Thick cables stretched away from it, past Gladio who stood in the arched doorway, peering out into the space beyond. Noctis joined him, squinting in the dimness.

The door opened into the side of a wide hallway that curved away out of sight to the right and left. The wall opposite the door curved, too, indicating some kind of central circular area at least three times the size of the one in Costlemark. Thick dust lined the floor of the hall, the middle disturbed by hundreds of footprints. The generator’s cables ran along the edge of the hall to a series of what were probably supposed to be floodlights, spaced thirty or forty feet apart along the hall in both directions. Their bulbs flickered weakly, as though struggling to function against the darkness of the ruin, the intermittent flashes almost worse than no light at all.

Gladio held up a hand for silence; a moment later they heard that distant faint shout again, still too far away to make out any words. Just as before, it was followed by a heavy thumping, and this time Noctis felt the ground vibrate under his boots. Gladio pointed left along the hall and motioned for Noctis and the others to follow him.

As Noctis made his way around the gentle curve, Prompto hurried to walk close beside him. The floor sloped here, an easier descent than Costlemark, but Noctis still had to watch his footing in the flickering light. His back twinged, the old scar just to the left of his spine where the Marilith had nearly killed him, and his left leg wobbled under him. He caught his balance and snuck a glance at Ignis and Gladio, but they were both watching the doors to either side for any signs of danger, and hadn’t noticed his slip. Good - he didn’t need them fussing over him.

Prompto was distracted too, rubbing his arms, his eyes huge as he stared around. “You okay?” Noctis whispered.

“Fine, I’m fine,” Prompto whispered back, but his voice was shaky and he was obviously lying. “Just… in all the other ruins we’ve gone poking around in, we’ve been jumped by daemons, y’know?”

“The Imperials must have cleared them out,” Ignis said. Even he kept his voice low - something about the place seemed to demand silence. “These floodlamps were probably meant to keep them at bay.”

“Doesn’t look like they’ll last much longer, though,” Gladio said. “Better hurry.”

Prompto shuddered and pressed even closer to Noctis, their elbows bumping as they walked. Noctis flashed him what he hoped was a reassuring grin, but in truth he was as freaked out as Prompto sounded. This place was _eerie_. Noct’s skin tingled with the presence of magic in the air, and his back kept twinging, his left leg threatening to give out. Bits of dirt and debris crunched underfoot as they moved, keeping them from being stealthy. They didn’t hear any more shouting, but every so often the ground would shake, setting more debris raining from overhead. Prompto jumped with every rattle, and Noctis caught even Gladio twitching.

The third or fourth time it happened, Noctis asked Ignis, “What do you think’s causing that?”

Ignis hesitated, his eyes going distant as he thought, then he shook his head. “Hard to say. Could be as benign as excavation equipment left running, or as dangerous as the start of a collapse.”

“Great,” Prompto muttered under his breath.

“Or daemons,” Gladio said. Noctis glared at him, appalled, and he glared back. “What? Could be.”

“What daemon is big enough to shake an entire underground ruin?” Noctis asked. Even the _thought_ made him shiver.

“That jabberwock under Costlemark,” Ignis said thoughtfully, and Noctis turned to see him rubbing his chin, apparently giving the idea serious consideration.

“ _Great_ ,” Prompto muttered again, and Noctis bumped his shoulder in sympathy.

They’d circled the central column at least four or five times by now, as best Noctis could tell, passing doorways roughly every quarter-turn. Some of the doors were open, with cables leading inside from the occasional flickering floodlamp; others were blocked off with rubble and dirt. Noctis and Gladio took turns poking their heads inside the open rooms, but spotted nothing of interest except a couple more generators - the Imperials must have cleared the place out already.

Then Gladio, roaming a little ahead of them, stopped short. “Whoa.”

“What?” Noctis demanded, hurrying forward. Then skidded to a halt when he saw what had caught Gladio’s eye: a massive hole in the floor ahead. It looked like part of the central column of the hallway had collapsed entirely, taking the floor and a good chunk of the room on the left with it. A mound of rubble sloped from just below the ceiling on the right down into the darkness of the level below. A floodlight stood near the top of the slope, canted precariously, its bulb dead and silent - whatever generator had powered it must have fallen victim to the collapse.

“It _was_ a cave-in,” Prompto said, a hint of smug pride in his voice.

“Would you like a gold star?” Ignis asked dryly.

“Don’t go handing out awards just yet,” Gladio said. “It’s a cave-in, sure, but it ain’t nearly bad enough to vanish an entire base’s worth of Niffs.” Without waiting for a response, he jumped over to the top of the slope and began working his way down.

Prompto rolled his eyes, but when Noctis held out a hand, he gripped it without complaint and braced himself to support Noctis across the gap. The slope was steep and unstable, broken stones and clumps of dirt breaking loose under Noct’s feet as he scrabbled down after Gladio, with Prompto and Ignis close behind. More of those heavy thumps rattled the ground, shaking loose still more debris in waves around their ankles.

“That’s not mining equipment,” Noctis said uneasily.

“Or falling stones,” Ignis agreed. “Keep your eyes—”

A noise from the darkness interrupted him. “Hello?”  

All four of them froze. The shout had been clear this time: weak and hoarse, but nearby, echoing strangely off the walls. A moment later, the voice called again. “Hey! Is someone there?”

“Where are you?” Noctis called back. He jerked his head at Gladio and Ignis, and they hurried forward, jacket lights swinging as they searched for the source. The thumping stopped abruptly, replaced by a scrabbling sound like claws on stone.

“I’m under the rocks,” the voice answered. “I got buried when the ceiling collapsed.” He sounded male and very young - a teenager at most, though there was something oddly familiar about his voice that Noctis couldn’t quite place. The scrabbling increased, loud enough that they had to strain to hear the boy over it; Noctis couldn’t help but think it sounded disconcertingly like a cat pawing at a closed door. Whatever it was, it was trapped somewhere very close by, and wanted out.

“Over here,” Gladio said, and they hurried to join him. He crouched over a spot at the edge of the slope, studying the mound of rubble critically. Sudden movement caught Noctis’s eye, and he spotted a gloved hand poking out from beneath the rocks, the fingers wiggling weakly. The glove was torn in several places and stained with blood, but the hand was otherwise intact.

“How pinned are you?” Ignis asked over the scrabbling. “Are you hurt?”

“My leg’s stuck,” the boy answered, and Noctis heard a hitch of pain in his voice. “But there’s kind of a pocket here. I tried to dig out but it made more rocks fall. And that jabberwock ain’t helping.”

“ _Jabberwock?!_ ” Prompto squeaked.

“Yeah,” the boy said. “It’s what took the ceiling down. I’m not sure what happened but I think it got buried too, and dug out in the other direction.”

Ignis eyed the rubble mound. “And now it’s trapped back there, trying to dig its way out here.”

“Great,” Prompto moaned. “Just _great!_ _Why_ did I let you talk me into coming down here again?”

Noctis thumped him on the arm. “Because you love me and you know it.”

Prompto snorted. “Love’s kind of a strong word for a guy who’s dragged me in front of _two jabberwocks_ in less than a month.”

“We better hurry,” Gladio interrupted, eyeing the mound of rubble and broken stone. It shook in time with the clawing sounds, and small rivers of dirt indicated that the jabberwock trapped behind it was making headway.

“Just hold on, okay?” Noctis called to the boy. “We’ll get you out.”

Gladio had already started hauling rocks off the mound a little ways above the boy’s hand. He muttered instructions to Prompto and Ignis, directing their efforts to keep the slope from collapsing further. Between the jabberwock’s scrabbling and the mound’s precarious balance, it would be all too easy to crush the trapped boy even as they tried to free him.

Noctis knelt at their feet, summoning a bottle of water from the armory and pressing it into the boy’s hand. “Here - try to drink this.” They’d need him as functional as possible once they got him loose, in case the jabberwock escaped.

The hand slid back under the rubble; a moment later he heard the boy gulping down the water. When he spoke again, he sounded a lot less hoarse. “Thanks. Um. Who are you guys, anyway?”

Noctis shot a glance at Ignis, who said carefully, “We’re hunters. We were investigating the ruin when we heard you shouting.”

“...oh,” the boy said quietly. There was something oddly lost in his tone, like that wasn’t the answer he’d been hoping for.

“Get ready to lift,” Gladio cut in, catching Noct’s eye and waving him toward one end of a big slab of rock they’d unearthed. It was leaning against the crumbling base of a wall, probably the ceiling forming the pocket the boy was trapped in. Noctis gripped his corner, bracing himself against the near-constant rattle of the jabberwock’s digging, and Ignis moved to join him. With Gladio and Prompto on the other side, they heaved the slab up and away from the mound.

The boy hissed in pain as their jacket lights fell across his face, throwing one hand up to shield his eyes. He was definitely young, with the thin, gangly look of a teenager about to hit a growth spurt. He was sprawled half on his stomach, one leg curled beneath him, the other pinned under more rocks. His clothes were covered in dust, grime, and blood, torn in several places along with the skin beneath. Under the mess, they looked oddly like the old Crownsguard uniform, before the design had been updated when Regis had taken the throne. Even the beret clinging stubbornly to his head looked Crownsguard-issue.

Then the kid lowered his hand, blinking exhausted blue eyes up at them, and Noctis froze.

He _knew_ that face.

Gladio and Ignis did, too; Ignis sucked in a breath of surprise, and Gladio’s eyebrows shot up. The boy looked between them defiantly. “What?”

“You’re—” Noctis said, at the same time Gladio said, “Aren’t you—”

“Cor Leonis,” Ignis finished for them both, sounding shocked.

Prompto stared at them, then down at the boy. “Wait, what?” he demanded. “That can’t be Cor - he’s way too—”

“If you say _short_ , or _little_ ,” the boy snarled, “or anything that even _sounds_ like either of those, I will rip your feet off and jam them on top of your Stars-damned _head_.”

Prompto jumped behind Gladio, looking almost comically terrified even though Noctis was pretty sure he’d been about to say _young_. Ignis stepped between them, swaying a bit as a particularly violent thump rattled the floor, and caught the boy’s eye. “No one’s calling anyone anything,” Ignis said calmly. “Are you truly Cor Leonis?”

“Yes,” the boy grumbled. “And yes, I really am this young, and yes, King Mors has a kid for a bodyguard,” he added in the tone of one who’d answered those questions far more often than he preferred.

Noctis blinked, trading a baffled look with Ignis. “Uh… how old _are_ you?” It wasn’t the question he really wanted to ask, but he couldn’t come up with a way to say _but you’re supposed to be forty-five and my dad’s bodyguard, not my grandfather’s_ that wouldn’t make things even more bizarre than they already were.

“Sixteen,” Cor said. He folded his arms over his chest, managing to look defiant despite still being pinned on the floor. “Are you going to get me out of here or—”

Something _crunched_ overhead, and a flood of debris exploded above them and came raining down the mound. Cor flung his arms up to protect his head and Prompto leaped forward, trying to shield the boy from the falling rubble, while Gladio shoved Noctis behind him. Noctis looked up to see a massive, snaggle-toothed beak shove out from behind the mound of rubble. “Damn,” he spat. “Prompto, Ignis, get Cor loose. Gladio, with me.”

“Right,” Gladio said.

“Be careful,” Ignis added.

Noctis rolled his eyes at his chamberlain as he started up the slope toward where the jabberwock was using its beak to widen the hole it had created. “What, you don’t think Gladio and I can take this thing?”

“This is hardly the time for joking,” Ignis said, but underneath the scolding tone Noctis heard genuine worry.

“We’re not gonna try to—” Gladio said, then had to summon his shield over Noctis’s head as the jabberwock knocked more stone loose. “—try to kill it, Iggy.”

“Just hurry up and get Cor out of there,” Noctis said. The jabberwock had widened the hole enough to scrabble at the edges with its stubby front legs - it would climb through any second now. Noctis called his engine blade to hand and flung it at the creature’s eye, bending reality around himself to warp after it. The strike missed the eye as the jabberwock tossed its head, but Noctis used the momentum of the warp to drive the blade deep into the scales of its temple.

Gladio shouted somewhere below, his greatsword clanging off the creature’s claws. Noctis slashed at the jabberwock’s head, timing each strike to flip himself back up into the air, away from its snapping teeth. “Gladio, do it!” he yelled.

He saw the silver flash of Gladio’s sword from the corner of his eye, and warped into place just in time to follow up on the massive blow with a strike of his own. The jabberwock’s beak cracked under the force of the dual attack, and a tooth longer than Noctis’s arm broke loose and clattered down the mound of rubble. The jabberwock roared in pain and rage, tossing its head and forcing Noctis to take cover behind Gladio’s shield again as more rubble went flying.

“Incoming!” Prompto shouted. His gun barked, and Noctis and Gladio both turned their heads away an instant before the sunburst bullet exploded in the jabberwock’s face.

“Time to go, Noct,” Ignis called as the jabberwock reeled from the flash.

Gladio shoved Noct down the mound, ahead of yet another rain of broken stone. At the base of the pile, Ignis had dragged Cor free of the rocks, and now Cor was trying to haul himself to his feet using Ignis’s arm for support. His face was white with pain, though, and the leg that had been trapped was bloody and clearly unable to support his weight.

Prompto danced away from the falling stone, firing off more shots to keep the jabberwock off-balance as Gladio skidded past Noct, his shield vanishing in a cloud of blue sparks. He scooped Cor up in his arms without stopping, earning an indignant yell from the kid but neatly solving the problem of how the hell Cor was going to run away from a pissed-off jabberwock on a bad leg. It didn’t solve the other problem, though, which was that with the jabberwock in the way, they couldn’t climb back up the mound to get to the upper level.

“Specs!” Noctis yelled. “Where to?”

“This way,” Ignis called back, and pointed along the hall away from the jabberwock. _Right_ , Noctis realized. The big hall was a corkscrew, and with the jabberwock trapped below them, they could just run back up the hall. They’d still have to jump the hole in the upper level, directly over the creature’s head, but they could deal with that when they got there.

The entire ruin shuddered and the jabberwock roared in victory. Noctis didn’t need to glance over his shoulder to know the thing had finally broken completely free of the rubble mound - and was now hot on their heels. “RUN!” he screamed.

They ran.

Their jacket lights bounced wildly off the walls, turning the place into a hellish nightmare of flashing lights and dancing shadows. The floor shook under their feet with the jabberwock’s every step, and the only thing saving them was the fact that the beast was too big to easily navigate the curve of the hallway. In seconds they circled the central column and reached the hole in the next level up. With an agility born of adrenaline and terror, Prompto and Ignis simply vaulted the entire gap without so much as pausing. Noctis warped to a point halfway across, jammed his blade into the stone wall, braced his feet, and summoned a spare shield onto his other arm - just in time for Gladio, weighed down by Cor, to leap out and kick off the shield to clear the gap.

The jabberwock rounded the bend in the hall as Noctis let the shield dissolve into glittering sparks, and he warped the rest of the way across the gap inches ahead of a snap of its beak. Up ahead, Ignis and Prompto had grabbed one of the floodlights that lined the hall. Its light had gone out, but that didn’t seem to bother them: Ignis swung it around to face the jabberwock while Prompto frantically fiddled with something near its base. The jabberwock roared again and Noctis glanced back to see it gathering itself to leap over the hole—

The floodlight flared to life just as the jabberwock leapt, and it screeched in surprise and pain at the brilliant light. Its jump interrupted, it dropped down through the hole, making the entire ruin rattle and knocking loose more small debris from the ceiling. “No time to dawdle,” Ignis said, and shooed Noctis and Prompto up the hall. “It’ll be back quick enough.”

Gladio jogged past them, not even out of breath yet despite carrying Cor in his arms. The kid’s eyes were closed and his face, twisted with pain, had gone sickly pale even in the dim glow from their jacket lights. He was clearly trying to hold his injured leg still, but getting jostled too much to succeed. Prompto eyed him worriedly. “I have bandages—”

“Not until we’re clear of the jabberwock,” Ignis said.

As if to illustrate his point, the creature roared again, the ruins shaking with its pounding footsteps as it once more came after them. Noctis turned his attention to running, breathing in two steps, out two steps, keeping his pace steady and watching for the twinge in the middle of his back that was all the warning he’d get if his bad leg gave out. Thank all the Stars, it held long enough to make it to the top of the sloped hall, up the ladder, and through the hole in the ceiling.

The jabberwock howled in fury as they left it behind, trapped by the narrow openings leading out of the ruin. Still, they didn’t pause until they’d reached the top of the Imperials’ makeshift ramp out of the pit, safe in the bright afternoon sun. Only then did they stop, clustering in an exhausted huddle beside an Imperial shipping crate, out of sight of the handful of MTs which still patrolled the area.

Noctis leaned against the side of the crate, panting, and dug his knuckles into the aching muscles of his back. This much running was never good for the old wound there, aggravating whatever the hell had been going on with it all day, and he didn’t think he’d be able to stay on his feet much longer. He saw Ignis watching him worriedly and forced his hand down, then looked over at Gladio.

“Kid’s out cold,” Gladio said quietly. He looked guilty, even though all he’d done was carry Cor to safety - it wasn’t as though they’d had any better options. But fresh blood dripped from Cor’s leg, and his face was still that sickly grey, stark against the black of Gladio’s jacket. “We need to get him someplace safe.”

“We could take him back to Cape Caem,” Prompto suggested. “I mean, we came out here to find Cor, right? And we found him, so shouldn’t we—”

“No way,” Gladio said, unexpectedly vehement.

“Why not?” Prompto asked.

“Iris is at Cape Caem,” Gladio said, as if that explained everything. When Noctis and Prompto both frowned at him in confusion, he rolled his eyes. “Iris is fifteen,” he said patiently. “This Cor is sixteen. She already has a puppy crush on the forty-five-year-old version, I’m not bringing her one that’s her age.”

“Wait, Iris is crushing on _Cor?!_ ” Prompto demanded, scandalized. “I thought she still has the hots for—”

“Shut it,” Noctis said hurriedly. Prompto smirked at him and he felt a blush creeping up his cheeks. Stupid cheeks. “She knows I’m marrying Luna. She got over it.”

“Exactly,” Gladio said. “We ain’t taking him to Cape Caem.”

“What about Lestallum?” Noctis asked. He wanted to get the focus off him and Iris _right now_ , before Gladio kicked his ass.

But Ignis shook his head. “Cor is too well-known in Lestallum. Too many refugees from Insomnia who might recognize him and ask questions we can’t answer.”

“Like why he’s sixteen instead of forty-five,” Prompto said, and Ignis nodded. That was definitely a question they needed an answer to, but it would have to wait until Cor regained consciousness - which meant getting him someplace safe where they could patch him up.

“We’ll have to use a haven for now,” Noctis said. “There’s one about an hour north of here.” He glanced at Ignis. “Think you can handle his leg?”

“I’m a chamberlain, not a doctor,” Ignis said, though there was no real annoyance in his voice, and he sighed. “I’ll see what I can do.”

“Good,” Noctis said. He pushed off the crate, resolutely ignoring the ominous twinge in his back. “Then let’s get going.”


	2. Chapter 2

Cor came awake hazily, his head fuzzy, his mouth dry, and his right leg throbbing. Oh, and he really, really needed to take a piss. _That_ was what broke through the fog in his brain and snapped him back to full awareness. Memory flashed through his brain: the jabberwock, the cave-in, the hunters who’d rescued him. Except they weren’t ordinary hunters. Cor had been dizzy with pain and dehydration, but he knew he hadn’t imagined the so-called hunters summoning weapons just like Regis did. Or that the one who’d carried him, who looked so much like Clarus that for a moment Cor had thought it _was_ him - had an eagle tattoo on his chest. The tattoo which only Clarus was legally allowed to have, the one which was reserved for Amicitias serving as the Shield of the King.

Cor opened his eyes to see the walls of a tent, green and glowing faintly with diffuse sunlight. The material looked odd, though, nothing like the waxed-canvas tent Clarus hauled around for the rare times they got stuck outside overnight. The unzipped sleeping bag spread across the bottom of the tent was likewise odd, as was the one draped over Cor’s body except for his right leg, which was wrapped in bandages and propped up on another folded sleeping bag.

Right. The jabberwock, the rain of stone crashing down around him. Cor tried to sit up and immediately regretted it; pain flared up his leg and he had to grit his teeth around a cry. This was bad. He had no idea where he was, no idea who these hunters were with their weird gear and illegal tattoos, and most importantly _why could they summon weapons like Regis?_

Actually, scratch that. Most importantly, where _was_ Regis? Cor was sure he’d managed to knock him out of the way of the collapsing wall and therefore the jabberwock behind it, but he hadn't thought Regis would just abandon him. Even if he and Clarus had temporarily retreated, they would have come back for him.

Wouldn't they?

Cor scrubbed a hand over his face. _Think about that later_ , he told himself firmly. The immediate issue was figuring out where he was and who those hunters were. After that he could make sure Regis was safe, and take care of that jabberwock. Or maybe just seal up the old ruin and leave the thing to starve.

Carefully Cor pushed himself upright. Pain flashed through his leg again, but he was ready for it this time and breathed through it until he was able to sit up fully. He was dressed in someone else’s clothes: a t-shirt with bright pixelated figures printed on the front, and chocobo-print pajama pants which Regis and Clarus would never let him live down, rolled up to make room for the bandage around his ankle. His own clothes were missing, as was his sword, and a flash of shame and anger washed through him. That was the second sword he’d lost in two months.

Swallowing it back - now was _not_ the time to think about what had happened in Gilgamesh’s cave - Cor maneuvered onto his hands and knees. The bulky bandages around his leg made it awkward, but he managed to crawl to the tent’s entrance and ease open the zipper.

Warm morning sunlight filled the tent, along with the smell of something cooking. The sky overhead, framed by tall evergreens, was a bright blue studded with a handful of fluffy clouds, strange to see without the once-ubiquitous shimmer of the Wall. Only a month or so had passed since King Mors had been forced to pull the Wall back to the borders of Insomnia, and it was still unsettling to think of the rest of the country being abandoned to the Imperials.

Pushing those thoughts aside, Cor resumed his study of the area. The camp was on a haven, its runes glowing even in the bright morning sunlight. A group of chocobos, saddled for riding, grazed and cheeped lazily at each other under the trees to one side of the haven. The tent Cor was in sat at the edge of the raised stone, while a quartet of folding chairs surrounded the firepit in the center, and a tiny folding table and grill sat along the opposite edge. One of the so-called hunters stood at the grill, his back to Cor as he stirred a steaming pot. Not the tall one who’d carried Cor out of the ruins; Cor thought this was the one with the educated Tenebraen accent. There was no sign of the other three hunters.

“Good morning,” the man called over his shoulder.

Busted. Cor dragged himself further out of the tent, squinting against the bright sunlight. “Where are we?” he asked.

“Oathe Haven, in southern Duscae,” the man answered. “About an hour away from the ruin where we found you.” He lifted the pot off the grill and set it aside, then finally turned around. In the bright daylight, his hair was almost blond, and his green eyes were sharp behind narrow glasses. His white button-down shirt and suspenders were a far cry from the all-black suit he’d worn yesterday - _royal_ black, another question Cor needed an answer to. “How are you feeling?” the man asked.

“Fine,” Cor lied. He wasn’t - his leg felt like someone was jamming iron spikes through it, he was nauseous with pain and hunger, and he still needed to piss - but he wasn’t about to admit that to this stranger. “Who are you? Where are your friends?”

“My name is Ignis,” he answered. “The others went to the lake to catch breakfast.”

Cor frowned. It was all so… so frustratingly _normal_ , just like when he and Regis and the others camped out on their trips to get Regis his Royal Arms. Clarus and Cid - before Cid and Regis had had that fight - would have been the ones catching breakfast. Weskham would have been the one cooking, if he hadn’t decided to stay in Accordo. It had just been Regis and Clarus and Cor this time, this last Arm while King Mors could still risk allowing the Crown Prince to leave Insomnia. But then they’d followed the trail of the Sword of the Tall down into that Stars-damned ruin, and now Regis and Clarus were missing and Cor was stuck here, injured and with no way to reach them.

Ignis was still watching him, his face politely expressionless but his eyes alert. Cor needed information, needed to figure out what had happened to Regis and Clarus, but he couldn’t do that with his leg injured. One thing at a time, then, just like Cid used to advise. Take care of the small things, the immediate things, first, until you’re ready to tackle the big things. Bodily functions might be small, but they were distractions he could remove right now. “I, um,” Cor started, then hesitated, abruptly embarrassed.

Fortunately, Ignis apparently realized what he needed. “The latrine is just round the side,” he said, indicating with a tilt of his head. “Allow me.” Circling the campfire, he crouched beside Cor, hooking an arm around his shoulders and helping him upright. A wave of dizziness hit Cor as he stood, pain lancing up his leg, but Ignis waited it out with uncanny discernment before beginning to half-guide, half-carry him toward the ramp down the side of the haven.

It was embarrassing as hell, but Ignis had Weskham’s knack for helping while remaining all but invisible. Cor took care of business and let Ignis help him back to the chairs around the campfire. By the time Ignis settled him into one and gotten his foot propped up on a second, pain had narrowed Cor’s vision to a tunnel and he had to breathe in short shallow bursts to keep from throwing up.

“We used all the hunters’ salve we had on your leg,” Ignis said apologetically as he settled Cor’s foot. “But you really ought to see a doctor. I don’t think the bone is broken, but there was a great deal of damage nonetheless.”

“I’ll manage,” Cor gasped. Ignis pressed a camp canteen into his hands and he drank, the water a relief against his dry throat. “I gotta find my friends first.”

Before Ignis could respond, a shout from beyond the edge of the haven caught their attention. Glancing past Cor’s shoulder, Ignis said, “Ah, it appears breakfast has arrived. We’ll discuss your situation after everyone has eaten.”

“Right,” Cor agreed. Food sounded glorious. A few minutes’ respite to let the pain fade sounded even better.

The other three hunters arrived at the haven in a riot of playful shouting and shoving which culminated in the big guy bodily lifting the skinny blond one and pretending to drop him into the fire. “Okay!” the blond yelled. “Okay, okay, okay! I’m sorry! You don’t smell like fish guts, you smell like fresh timber and manly things!”

“That’s right,” the big guy said smugly. He had an outcity accent at odds with Ignis’s fancy Tenebrae speech and the blond’s high-city accent. “Remember that the next time you try dunking me in the lake.”

“If Prompto ever manages to dunk you,” the slim dark one said, “I’m giving him your job.”

“Ooh,” the blond said. “Does that mean I get his pay, too?”

“If you’re all quite finished,” Ignis cut in over the big guy’s good-natured grumbling, “I’ll take whatever you caught and finish cooking. Unless you were unsuccessful?”

The slim dark one lifted a fishhook with three huge fish, already gutted. “Coulda got more, but _somebody’s_ a spoilsport,” he said, with a pointed glance at the big guy.

“We were getting breakfast,” the big guy retorted, “not fishing the lake dry.”

“You can fish more later,” Ignis said, and nodded towards Cor. “After we’ve figured out how to help our guest.”

The other three all looked at Cor, their expressions going solemn. “Right,” the dark one said.

“Cor,” Ignis said, “allow me to introduce Noctis, Gladio, and Prompto,” indicating the dark one, the big guy, and the blond in turn.

Those were Crown City names, just like Ignis’s, a far cry from the simpler and less archaic names used by the majority of the Lucian populace. Keeping his expression blank, Cor nodded to them. “Nice to meet you. And, uh, thanks for getting me out of there yesterday.”

“No problem,” Noctis said. “You’re looking better today.”

“Not hard to be better than buried under a cave-in with a jabberwock over your head,” Cor pointed out.

“He has a point,” Prompto said. Noctis snorted and dropped into one of the two remaining camp chairs, sighing with audible relief and digging his knuckles into his lower back. Prompto settled at his feet, leaning against his legs, while Gladio took the last chair.

Cor took a moment to study them. Like Ignis, they were dressed differently today, no longer in the royal blacks they’d worn in the ruin, but a white t-shirt and jeans for Noctis; a red tank top with cargo pants for Prompto; and white pants, a muscle shirt, and - despite the heat of the day - a leather jacket for Gladio. Gladio’s outfit was probably supposed to hide his illegal tattoo, though Cor spotted the tip of a feather poking out from the wrist of the jacket. In the daylight, he looked less like Clarus than he had in the dark ruins - hair shaved on the sides, brown eyes instead of blue, one fresh scar along his forehead and an older one down his eye, and even more muscular - but the resemblance was still uncanny. Noctis looked familiar too, somehow. Not to the extent Gladio reminded Cor of Clarus, but something about the way Noctis moved or spoke was eerily familiar.

“So,” Noctis said, jolting Cor back to attention. “Wanna tell us _how_ you ended up buried in a cave-in with a jabberwock over your head?”

Cor hesitated. While the Crown Prince’s trips to collect the Royal Arms of the Lucii weren’t exactly a secret, they were hardly broadcast around the country. And with King Mors having pulled the Wall back, the countryside was suddenly far more dangerous than it had been the first few times Regis had ventured out. Six months ago, Cor wouldn’t have worried about mentioning the prince, but now… Now the Imperials were on their doorstep, and Cor hadn’t even managed to defeat Gilgamesh. He wasn’t sure he could protect Regis anymore.

Finally he said, “I was with a couple of friends. We heard there was treasure buried in a cave in southern Duscae, and we found that ruin and figured that must be it. We were looking around down there when the jabberwock attacked and broke the wall. I got buried. I thought my friends got away, but…” He shook his head, fear curling in his gut despite himself. He’d pushed Regis out of the way, he _knew_ it. They just… had had to go back to Insomnia for help, and Cor hadn’t been trapped down there for as long as it felt like. They _would_ have come back for him.

“What about you guys?” he asked, to cover the moment of weakness. “What were you doing in there?”

“Same as you,” Gladio said. “Spotted the ruin, figured we’d check it out.”

“We didn’t see anyone else in there,” Prompto added. He looked like he was about to say something else, but Noctis nudged him with a knee and Prompto closed his mouth instead.

“It’s quite likely your friends went to get aid and we passed them along the way,” Ignis said smoothly. Too smoothly; Cor knew an empty platitude when he heard one. Ignis continued, “Breakfast is ready. Cor, don’t try to stand, I’ll get a plate ready for you.”

“What about me?” Noctis asked. “Don’t I get a plate?” His eyes sparkled, his voice light with teasing, and abruptly that sense of familiarity clarified: He reminded Cor of Regis. It wasn’t nearly as strong a resemblance as between Gladio and Clarus, but it was there, and it was somehow even more unsettling. Cor could almost rationalize Gladio as a cousin of the Amicitias, too distant to be part of the known nobility but close enough to bear such a strong resemblance, but the Lucis Caelum bloodline was locked down pretty hard.

“You are perfectly capable of making your own plate,” Ignis retorted to Noctis. “I recommend you do so before Gladio and Prompto take it all.”

Gladio made a show of taking a huge helping of grilled fish, which was enough for Noctis to groan and haul himself to his feet - only to stagger and fall awkwardly back into the chair with a pained grunt. For a second Cor thought he was faking injury to get attention, but the way his pale skin had gone greenish was definitely real.

Ignis was at his side immediately. “Noct—”

“Fine,” Noct said through gritted teeth. “I’m fine. Just lost my balance.” He swatted Ignis’s hand away and pushed himself up again, not quite managing to hide a wince as he put weight on his left leg.

“It was that ramp yesterday, wasn’t it,” Gladio said. “Wondered if that’d give you trouble.” He hadn’t moved from the table holding the breakfast spread, but was watching Noctis closely. Beside him, Prompto balanced on the balls of his feet like he was preparing to lunge if Noctis stumbled again.

“I’m _fine_ , guys,” Noctis said. “Really. Quit fussing.” He sounded exactly like Regis when he got exasperated - unsettlingly so. He crossed the few steps to the table, pointedly shouldering Gladio out of the way, and began filling his own plate. Ignis watched, a thin line of worry between his eyebrows, but when Noctis managed to load up his plate and return to his chair with only a slight limp, Ignis finally turned away and handed Cor the plate of grilled fish and vegetables he’d been holding.

For a few minutes the only sounds in the camp were of eating. Cor was starving; he still had no idea how long he’d been pinned under the rubble in the ruin, but his stomach clearly thought it had been _forever_. It took all his willpower to not just hold the plate to his mouth and tip the contents straight down his gullet. But he’d endured too much teasing from Clarus and Regis about his commoner’s manners to give in to the temptation. Ignis and the others weren’t exactly being formal-dining proper, given the limited camp supplies, but it was clear they’d had the training. Cor didn’t want to look even more pathetic to them than he was sure he already did with his foot bandaged and propped up on a chair. He made himself eat slowly and politely, and remembered to say _thank you_ when Prompto handed him a canteen of water and offered to make him a second plate.

He was so focused on maintaining manners that he didn't notice, at first, when Ignis pulled out a small slim device and began tapping at it with one thumb. He did notice when Noctis pulled out a similar device - and then he noticed the cadence of their thumb taps, alternating back and forth. _Like a conversation_ , Cor realized. Like when Niflheim radio operators sent coded transmissions over the air, exchanging patterns of beeps that signaled troop movements.

He was about to call them out on it when Ignis looked up from his device and glanced at Noctis, who nodded. Ignis said, “So, Cor. Let’s discuss your situation.”

He didn’t miss the way the others sat up a little at that, or how Gladio and Prompto traded furtive looks. Cor set his empty plate aside and focused on them. “Yeah, let’s.” Regis would’ve chided him for sounding combative, but it was about damn time Cor started getting answers.

Ignis continued, “I’m afraid we haven’t given you the whole truth. We weren’t at the ruins by chance. A friend of ours contacted us yesterday with the news that you’d been missing in those ruins for a few days now, and asked that we investigate.”

“A friend?” Cor repeated. Hope surged in his chest - maybe Regis and Clarus hadn’t abandoned him after all. “Who? Clarus? Regis?”

Noctis flinched visibly, and Gladio looked away, a muscle tightening in his jaw. The rest of his questions died on Cor’s tongue. Those weren’t the reactions he’d expected. He frowned at them, frustration growing - with them, with the stupid jabberwock who’d broken everything, with this whole Gods-damned situation. He was tired of their attempts to hide things, tired of not knowing what the frozen hell was going on, and he was done with all of it. “That’s not the only thing you’re hiding, is it,” he snapped.

Noctis and Ignis glanced at each other and Cor kept talking, not giving them a chance to say anything else. “You’re not as sneaky as you think you are. You were all wearing royal blacks in the ruins yesterday. You—” He jabbed a finger toward Gladio. “Have an illegal tattoo. Only Amicitia men serving as sworn Shields to the royal family are allowed to wear that design. And I _saw_ you all summoning weapons like the Lucis Caelums. I don’t know _how_ , because the number of people who can do that I can count on my fingers, but you _were_ , I saw it.” He glared around at them. “So what the hell is going on? Who _are_ you people?”

Gladio snorted, apparently unconcerned by his anger. “I told you he’d figure it out,” he said to his friends. “He likes to let people think he’s just dumb muscle, but he didn’t get where he is by being oblivious.”

“Hey!” Cor protested on reflex, then stopped as the rest of Gladio’s words caught up to him. Playing dumb sounded like something Clarus would do - he’d confided to Cor once, in Altissia, that few people outside the royal family realized that being a Shield involved more than just brute strength, but Clarus liked to let them continue to think so because it meant they underestimated him. Cor hadn’t been doing it on purpose, but he couldn’t exactly admit it without ruining the point. So he just folded his arms and said, “Yeah. So tell me the _truth_.”

Ignis, Gladio, and Prompto all looked at Noctis, who was watching Cor with calm regard exactly like the way Regis got when he was making a decision. Finally, without looking away from Cor, Noctis tilted his head toward Ignis. That, too, was so much like Regis that Cor’s chest ached, and he almost didn’t spot it when Ignis stood up straighter, taking a pose the way Weskham did when conducting formalities.

“Cor Leonis,” Ignis said formally, “allow me to introduce His Royal Highness Noctis Lucis Caelum, the Crown Prince of Lucis, son of His Majesty King Regis Lucis Caelum, one hundred and fourteenth of his line; and his sworn Shield, Gladiolus Amicitia, son of Lord Clarus Amicitia.”

Cor scowled at them. “Ha, ha,” he said. “Very funny. Regis is _twenty_. He’s the crown prince, not the king, and he doesn’t have kids. Neither does Clarus. Now tell me the _actual_ truth.”

“He did,” Gladio said. “What year is it?”

The question threw Cor, but only for a second. “M.E. seven twenty-seven,” he snapped. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“Wrong,” Gladio said calmly. “It's seven fifty-six. Last time we saw you, you were the forty-five-year-old Marshal of the Crownsguard, not a teenage pipsqueak.”

“Call me a pipsqueak again and I’ll shove your head into the ground,” Cor shot back, but the retort was both automatic and half-hearted. They certainly _looked_ like they believed they were telling the truth - no hidden smirks or furtive glances, none of the telltale signs of a prank. It was easier than Cor liked to picture Gladio as Clarus’s son rather than an unknown cousin. And Noctis… Noctis was still watching him, silent and unflappable, just like Regis. If you looked at him at the right angle, you could see the same jawline, the same royal hardness to his gaze.

Finally Cor said, “That's impossible. You know that, right? That’s—Time travel is impossible.”

“We haven't entirely ruled out some heretofore unknown Solheim de-aging magic,” Ignis admitted. “However, that’s at least as unlikely as time travel, so…” He spread his hands in an eloquent gesture of bafflement.

“But…” Cor protested, then floundered. “But…”

“Prompto,” Noctis said. “Show him your photos.”

“Right!” Prompto scrambled to his feet, a camera appearing in his hand in a rush of blue magic - the magic of the Crystal, the royal armory which only the Lucis Caelums and a handful of close retainers could access. Some near-hysterical part of Cor thought, _King Mors would kill Regis for letting a friend store a camera in the armory._

Prompto knelt beside him and turned the camera so Cor could see the back of it. It was as beat up as Cid’s old camera, but this one had a tiny TV screen which took up most of the back panel. At the moment it was displaying a close-up image of a grim-looking older guy with cropped hair, long sideburns, and a narrow strip of beard along his chin. For a bizarre moment Cor’s brain didn’t want to process the image - it was too unreal, too impossible. Cor could see a bit of his own father in the guy in the photo; gone was the baby fat which made him look more like his mother, which he still hadn’t got rid of at sixteen. The guy looked stern, imposing, _confident_ in a way Cor hadn’t felt since he’d watched Regis fall back from Accordo, since Cor’s own utter defeat at the hands of Gilgamesh.

Prompto pushed a button and the image on the camera screen changed: another shot of the grim guy, this one from a distance as he fought a coeurl with a katana. Cor’s breath caught at the sight of the blade. It wasn’t his own Genji Blade, the gift from King Mors he’d lost to Gilgamesh, but the shape was the same. As far as he knew, he was the only person in Lucis who’d ever mastered that style of weapon.

None of this was possible. He couldn’t be almost thirty years in the future - that was the stuff of dumb B-movies, not real life. But the man in Prompto’s photos looked enough like him that he couldn’t just discount the whole idea. And Gladio and Noctis looked enough like Clarus and Regis to make him wonder if it was, somehow, true.

Noctis was still watching him with that silent regard, his eyes shadowed behind his messy hair. Cor studied him back, trying to map Regis onto him. Of course, it wouldn’t be that perfect - Noctis would have a mother, too, and the moment Cor thought of it he remembered Aulea, Regis’s childhood friend whom he stared longingly at when he thought no one was looking.

Noctis had Aulea’s eyes.

Aulea’s eyes and Regis’s jaw, and somehow that was enough. “Fine,” Cor said reluctantly. “This is impossible, but… I believe you.”

“Well that’s good,” Noctis said, “‘cause we’re having a hard time believing it ourselves. It’s… really, really weird to see you as a kid.” He smiled, just a twist of the lips and a sparkle to his eye, but sincere, and Cor decided to let the _kid_ comment go. Noctis clearly didn't mean it as an insult, but a way to distinguish Cor from the grim, hardened man in Prompto’s photos.

Then Prompto ruined it by saying, “I honestly didn’t expect you to be so little. I mean, you’re smaller than _me._ ”

Cor rounded on him with a snarl, but Gladio laughed. “What’d you expect?” Gladio asked Prompto. “He’s sixteen. Did you think the Marshal was born six feet tall and bearded?”

“Wait,” Cor said. “I’m six feet tall in the future?”

“You’re taller than I,” Ignis confirmed.

“Awesome,” Cor breathed. “I’ll be taller than Regis!”

“You’re more excited about that than being the Marshal of the Crownsguard,” Prompto teased as he retreated to sit at Noctis’s feet again.

Cor snorted. “Being the Marshal sounds like a lot of paperwork. And do you know how much shit the other ‘Guards give me for being a kid? I’ll take being six feet tall any day.”

“Of course,” Ignis said, “if we don’t figure out how to return you to your own time, you _certainly_ won’t become the Marshal.”

“Iggy’s got a point,” Gladio agreed. “How ‘bout you tell us how you ended up where we found you? The Cor I know wouldn’t have gone treasure-hunting in an old ruin. So what’s the real story?”

Cor sighed, then looked over at Noctis. “Did Regis tell you about the Royal Arms yet?”

Something odd sparked in Noctis’s eyes, and his voice was tight when he said, “I know about them. I’m collecting them, too.”

“We were going to pick up the Sword of the Tall,” Cor explained. “But when we got there, the sword was missing - stolen. Clarus tracked the thieves into those ruins, and we were trying to trace it down there. We finally found it in this weird room with a bunch of weird… I dunno, technology? I guess? It was a bunch of metal panels and pillars and stuff, glowing red and blue. Regis tried fiddling with some of it, but couldn’t figure out how to make it do anything.”

It had been yet another frustration for Regis, another disappointment, tiny in the scheme of things but magnified by their recent losses. They’d all known that Cid would’ve been able to figure it out if he’d been there, but he wasn’t. Cor still didn’t know the details of his and Regis’s fight, but whatever it had been about, it wasn’t something either of them was willing to back down from. After leaving Weskham in Altissia, losing Cid had been just one more blow to the Crown Prince, one more sign of his own failure even as he watched his father cede more and more ground to Niflheim. Being able to work the Solheim tech - potentially a valuable asset in the war - would have been a much-needed victory.

Cor shook his head, forcing himself to focus. If losing Wesk and Cid had been bad, he didn’t want to think about how Regis might feel about apparently getting Cor killed under a mountain of rubble. He needed to get back there, which meant working with Noctis and his friends. Returning to his story, he said, “We were about to leave the room when the jabberwock came charging up from below. It was blocking the door, we couldn’t get out, so Regis called the Armiger on it to try to get it to back off. But it took the wall down instead. The last thing I remember is knocking Regis out of the way of a falling stone.”

“Huh,” Gladio said.

“That’s so weird,” Prompto said. “When we went looking for the Sword of the Tall, it was gone and the hunters had left a note saying they thought daemons took it.”

Noctis nodded. “There was a jabberwock in the bottom of the Costlemark ruins. We don’t know how, but it ended up with the Sword.”

“Strange indeed,” Ignis agreed, “and unlikely to be a coincidence.”

Cor frowned at him. “What?”

“You think it’s the same jabberwock,” Noctis said. His eyes narrowed in thought as he studied Ignis. “My dad didn’t have the Sword of the Tall.”

“You sure about that?” Gladio asked. “ _My_ dad said he’d only ever seen your old man call the Armiger a couple of times. Fighting the Niffs back in the day, and when—” He stopped abruptly, a complicated expression flashing across his face. Guilt, uncertainty, maybe concern.

Noctis said mildly, “It’s the only thing I remember. My dad with all his Arms. He definitely didn’t have a big ugly chainsaw sword.”

“What are you—” Prompto started, then stopped. “Oh. The Marilith, right.”

“Anyone wanna fill me in?” Cor said, annoyed.

Gladio and Prompto both looked at Noctis, but Ignis’s gaze stayed on Cor. There was something dangerous in his eyes, like Cor had suddenly become a threat. Whatever they were talking about must’ve been sensitive.

Noctis, though, shrugged and slouched deeper in his chair. “When I was little, a Marilith attacked me. My dad chased it off.” Absently he twisted to dig his knuckles into his lower back. Cor didn’t know what a Marilith was, but he thought about how Noctis had fallen into the chair earlier, the protectiveness in Ignis’s gaze. The Marilith must’ve hurt Noctis pretty bad, then, if he still had issues as an adult.

It wasn’t the important part, though, so Cor just nodded ( _see, Clarus, he could be diplomatic when he wanted to_ ), and said, “But Regis got the Sword of the Tall. I watched him. It did the…” He waved his arms, indicating the way the weapon had floated up and shot through Regis’s chest. “The floaty stabby thing.”

Prompto stared at him. “I did _not_ just hear the freaking _Immortal_ say ‘the floaty stabby thing’.”  

“Don’t call me that,” Cor snapped.

“Why not?” Prompto said.

The question sounded honest, not teasing, but the nickname still made Cor’s blood boil, his cheeks flush with the humiliation of running from Gilgamesh. He looked away, shame locking the words in his throat. Then Gladio said, “Leave it.”

From the corner of his eye, Cor saw Prompto look between him and Gladio, clearly confused - but then he shrugged and leaned back against Noctis’s knees. “Okay,” he said easily, then added to Cor, “Sorry.”

Cor forced himself to take a breath, to look at Prompto and nod. The knowledge that people would still call him that thirty years in the future stung, but there wasn’t anything he could do about it. _He_ might know he’d only survived Gilgamesh because he’d turned tail and run, but everyone else just saw a skinny kid from the bad part of town who’d gone into that cave and come out alive.

“The relevant point, I believe,” Ignis said, smoothing the awkward moment with a diplomat’s skill, “is the difference between what this Cor has experienced, and what we have. Namely, that the Sword of the Tall was stolen some thirty years sooner for him than for us, taken to a different place, and ultimately retrieved by Regis.”

“What do you think it means?” Prompto asked.

Gladio made a thoughtful noise. “Some of the Crown City’s top scientists have been researching what they call the ‘branching time’ theory. Basically, the idea that time branches out into alternate realities based on quantum particle exchanges—What?” he demanded irritably as they all stared at him. “I ain’t reading shitty Accordan bodice-rippers on those five-hour car rides, you know.”

Noctis snorted. “I figured you just swapped out the book covers to hide your vices.”  

“That’s Iris’s trick,” Gladio said. “Anyway, the scientists were doing research on the Lucis Caelums’ warping when they noticed the weird effect it has on quantum entanglement. They’d borrowed some Glaives for experiments, and figured out that warping can affect the flow of time around the warper.” He hesitated, throwing a glance eastward over the mountains, then continued in a more subdued voice, “But that’s as far as they got before…”

Cor said, “Before what?”

Ignis’s lips pressed together. Prompto looked away, one foot tapping restlessly against the ground, and Noctis’s expression went cold and distant. It was something else they were hiding,  or maybe just didn’t want to talk about. He pressed, “Before _what?_ ”

Noctis met his eyes, his gaze flat, his voice level and steely. “Before the Imperials destroyed Insomnia and killed my dad and the whole court.”

The words hit Cor like a punch. “Wh—But—” he tried, then stopped, glancing reflexively up at the sky where the Wall no longer protected the countryside. “Insomnia’s… it’s…”

“All but leveled,” Ignis said softly. “As best we’ve heard, at least. The Imperials have blockaded the road in, and are scouring the countryside for Noctis. We don’t dare risk trying to get close.”

Cor stared up at him in horror. “Then Regis—”

Noctis pressed his lips together and turned away, his black hair falling around his face like a shield. Gladio’s expression was like stone, and Cor abruptly understood why they’d reacted so strangely when he’d mentioned Regis and Clarus earlier. If Regis was dead, Clarus had died first. They’d left behind sons locked out of their own home, trapped in the countryside King Mors had abandoned to the Niffs. No wonder Noctis and Gladio didn’t want to talk about it.

In a forced-cheerful voice, Prompto interjected, “It’s going to be okay, though. Noct’s collecting the Royal Arms, and Lady Lunafreya is making covenants with the gods. Pretty soon we’ll be able to kick the Niffs straight back where they came from. Right?”

“Right,” Noctis agreed, a little too quickly. He took a deep breath, visibly steeling himself, and turned to Gladio. “So… quantum, uh… time tangles?”

“Quantum entanglement,” Gladio corrected, clearly relieved to talk about something else. “It’s the property by which quantum particles respond to each other over long distances—”

Cor tuned out the science nerdery, his mind still stuck on the revelation that in less than thirty years, Insomnia would fall. The Niffs would win. He needed to know more about what happened, so that when he went back to his own time, he could do something about it - could save Insomnia, save Regis and Clarus and everyone else. He might not have been able to defeat Gilgamesh, but he could do this. He _had_ to do this.

Of course, knowing what would happen didn’t matter unless he was able to get back to his own time. He tuned back in to the discussion just as Noctis was saying, “Time does kinda… bend, I guess, when I warp-dodge. But I don’t know what that has to do with getting Cor back. I can’t warp through time.”

“And I didn’t warp here in the first place,” Cor said. “I just shoved Regis out of the way of the rocks. He didn’t warp me, either,” he added when Prompto opened his mouth to ask.

“We’re missing something,” Noctis said.

“We’ve also forgotten to take something into account,” Ignis added, then when they all looked at him in confusion, said, “The missing Imperials.” Aside to Cor, he clarified, “The Marshal had gone to the ruin to investigate an Imperial camp there, but when we arrived, the area was empty of Imperials. Completely so, as if they’d all vanished.”

“Like I did,” Cor said slowly, realization dawning.

Prompto stared at him. “Wait, are you saying—You think the Niffs got sent back in time?”

Noctis sat up straighter, clearly appalled. “To my _twenty-year-old dad?!_ ”

“Along with the Marshal,  presumably,” Ignis said in a reassuring tone. “Between him, Lord Amicitia, and your father’s own considerable skill, I imagine he’s fine.”

“He’d have to be, anyway,” Prompto said, “or else you wouldn’t be here.”

“Not necessarily,” Gladio pointed out. “Not if the time branch theory is true. And it probably is, ‘cause I’m pretty sure if that Cor—” he jerked a thumb in Cor’s direction— “is our Cor, he’d remember this and would’ve said something by now.”

Cor nodded vehemently. “First thing I’m doing when I get back is telling Regis about Insomnia. We can’t let that happen.”

“Yeah,” Noctis agreed softly. “And anyway, his version of my dad has the Sword of the Tall, and my dad doesn’t. So we know it’s a different timeline.”

“This hurts my head,” Prompto complained, flopping back against Noctis’s knees with an exaggerated groan. “We’re already dealing with gods and daemons and magic, now there’s _time travel_ and _alternate realities_ , too?”

“Tell me about it,” Noctis muttered.

“So what kind of magic could send an entire base’s worth of Niffs back in time, and at the same time bring Cor and a Jabberwock forward?” Gladio asked.

Prompto sat up abruptly, snapping his fingers, the melodrama of a moment before forgotten. “ _Solheim_ magic.” He turned to point at Cor. “You said you guys found Solheim magitek down there, right? There was a bunch of magitek in the bottom of Costlemark, too,” he continued without waiting for Cor to respond. “Some of it’s still working. Maybe the king did actually get the stuff you found to work, and nobody realized it.”

“He’s not the king yet,” Cor corrected absently, but he was already scouring his memory for anything else that might confirm or refute Prompto’s theory. “I think… I think when I pushed him, it was toward what he thought was the control panel.” He closed his eyes, struggling to pluck detail from the jumble of falling rocks and pain. Regis had gone flying toward the control panel and Clarus had lunged for him. It might have been Cor’s imagination or his memory playing tricks, but he thought, in the last moment before the rocks had engulfed him, he’d seen the blue flash of a warp. “He and Clarus might’ve warped. I don’t know for sure, though.”

“If they were mid-warp when it happened, that might be why they didn’t time-jump with everything else,” Gladio suggested, and glanced at Noctis. “You said time goes funky when you warp, right?”

Noctis nodded thoughtfully. “Yeah. And I think Prompto’s onto something about the Solheim magitek. I definitely felt something when we were down there - whatever that place was built for, it was still alive.”

“Eurgh,” Prompto muttered, and gave an exaggerated shudder.

“Then the question becomes,” Ignis said, “how do we reverse the effect?”

Noctis nudged Prompto with his knee. “Think you can make the magitek work?”

“Me?” Prompto sounded startled.

“You’re the only one who can get all those weird battle machines to work,” Noctis said. “And you kept your old game console running like three years after it should have died. _And_ you understand Cindy when she goes off about the Regalia’s engine.”

“Noct has a point,” Ignis said. “You’ve a talent for mechanical systems.”

Prompto had gone bright red from his nose to his ears. “Oh,” he said. “Um. Yeah, I can try!”

“Problem,” Gladio said. “Far’s I can tell, whatever magitek systems might be down there are currently buried under a few tons of rubble.”

“Can we use the Imperial mining equipment to clear it out?” Prompto suggested.

“Not unless we can find a way to get it down there that doesn’t involve doorway-sized holes,” Ignis said, and shook his head. “If there were a way to do so, I imagine the Imperials would have done it before we got here.”

“We could blow it up,” Cor said. They all turned to look at him, and he mimed a massive explosion. “We had to use explosives to clear out Keycatrich Trench so Regis could get to the tomb down there.”

Gladio pursed his lips and nodded thoughtfully. Noctis said, “Might work. Where can we get explosives?”

The question was directed at Ignis, who rubbed his chin. “Dave Auburnbrie may know.”

“Call him,” Noctis said. “See what you can find out.” He stood up, and Cor didn’t miss how the other three tensed, prepared to leap into action if Noctis stumbled again. But he just stretched lazily and yawned, then turned to the tent. “I’m gonna take a nap.”

Gladio rolled his eyes and Ignis smiled, faint and fond. “As you like,” he said to Noctis, then added, “Cor, you should rest as well. Your leg needs time to heal.”

“I’m fine,” Cor said automatically, but in truth, the suggestion sounded tempting. With a belly full of food and the morning sun warm overhead, sleep called like a Messenger’s lullaby. He knew he should stay awake, make sure Ignis could get his hands on explosives, find out whatever he could about Insomnia’s fall. But he knew, too, that Regis would’ve told him to rest and recover, to be prepared for their return to the ruin. Nobody had mentioned it, but Cor doubted they’d forgotten the jabberwock lurking down there. He’d need to be back on his feet if he had any hope of helping in _that_ fight.

He slouched lower in the camp chair, letting his head rest against the seat back and shifting until his injured foot hurt a little less where it was propped up on the other chair. He’d rest for a little while, then he’d ask questions. Just a little while, then he’d be back in action.

It wasn’t long before he was sound asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Healing potions in this game make no sense at all - they do nothing for Gladio's scars, Ignis's eyes, or Lunafreya's mortal injuries, yet in Episode: Prompto's campfire scene, a single potion not only completely repairs a nasty burn, it also restores the surface skin to its former condition, complete with RFID tattoo. Plus, having instant perfect healing magic really kinda ruins the potential for drama and hurt/comfort. 
> 
> For this fic, I'm using the same headcanon I did for _The Basis of Reality_ : "hit points" aren't a representation of bodily injury, they're an abstraction of your "ability to keep fighting". "Healing potions", therefore, don't directly repair injuries: they give you energy, a second wind, restoring your "ability to keep fighting" rather than your physical health. And "hunters' curatives" are the stuff that the Witch of the Woods creates: a pseudo-magical, highly effective Neosporin/superglue-wound-closure.


	3. Chapter 3

Cor awoke to a surge of pain up his leg so intense it left him breathless. He curled forward, fingers gripping the arms of the camp chair hard enough that his bones creaked, breathing through the pain.

“You okay?”

Gladio’s voice. Cor made himself sit up enough to spot him sitting on the other side of the fire, polishing a massive sword laid across his knees. His jacket was gone, and his eagle tattoo rippled under his shirt as his arms moved.

“Fine,” Cor ground out.

Gladio raised an eyebrow but didn’t push, returning his attention to the sword. The pain in Cor’s leg was starting to fade, thank the Six, and he managed to squirm back to an upright sitting position. He’d slid down in the chair while he slept, his injured leg slipping to the side, which was what had caused the flash of pain.

When he was situated, he looked around the camp, but couldn’t spot anyone besides Gladio. “Where’s everyone else?” Cor asked.

“His Highness is still sleeping,” Gladio said, jerking his head toward the tent. “Iggy and Prompto went foraging. Apparently there’s some rare nutmeg bush around here he wants to use for dinner tonight.”

“Were you guys able to find explosives?”

“Yeah,” Gladio said. “Dave - our contact in the Hunters - made some calls, and a friend of a friend of his will be here in a few hours with a truck full of commercial mining explosives.”

Cor grunted acknowledgement. He kind of wanted to go back to sleep, if they had to wait for the explosives to show up, but he also needed to piss again. Damn - he should’ve been more careful about eating before his leg was ready to take his weight again. Though, if they were headed back down into the ruins once the explosives got here, he might as well try it out and find out how bad it was.  

Swinging his leg off the chair sent pain knifing up his calf, but Cor gritted his teeth and pushed himself upright. The world swayed nauseatingly around him and for a bad moment he thought he was going to pass out. He breathed deep, bracing himself with his hands on the arms of the camp chair, and finally the lightheadedness faded.

When he looked up again, Gladio was right in front of him, his hands out to catch Cor and anger on his face that didn’t quite hide the worry in his eyes. “What the hell are you _doing_?!” Gladio demanded.

“Walking my snake, what does it look like?” Cor spat, and the surge of annoyed frustration gave him the strength to shove Gladio out of the way and limp across the haven toward the ramp down. Putting weight on his injured foot was agony, but it was better than letting someone help him take a leak like he was a Stars-damned _baby_. He’d done that once today and that was plenty.

Still, by the time he’d finished and made his way back to the chair, his vision had narrowed to a pained tunnel and he was seriously considering taking Gladio’s greatsword and hacking his whole damn leg off. But the sword was gone, probably vanished into Noctis’s armory, and Gladio was watching him with a strange expression on his face.

“What?” Cor snapped, then bit back a hiss of pain as he swung his leg up onto the other chair. At least having it elevated again made it feel slightly less like someone was jamming molten spikes into his calf.

Gladio shook his head. Blue Crystal magic glittered in his hand, solidifying into a flask full of soft white light, and he tossed the flask lightly to Cor. It was freezing cold to the touch, like Regis’s blizzard magic had been bottled up somehow. Cor pressed it gratefully against the side of his leg, and breathed out a shaky sigh of relief as the cold pushed back the worst of the pain.

Gladio was still watching him with that weird expression. Cor narrowed his eyes. “ _What._ ”

“It’s…” Gladio hesitated. “My dad always said you were stubborn as hell when you were a kid. But adult-you is stubborn, too, and I guess I didn’t realize he meant you were _this_ stupidly bullheaded.”

“I’m not a kid,” Cor snarled. “And I’m not _stupid_.”

“No?” Gladio raised an eyebrow. “Walking on that leg when you don’t have to sounds pretty dumb to me.”

“Ain’t like I had a choice,” Cor shot back, then winced. His stupid outcity accent showed up at the worst times, no matter how hard he worked to get rid of it.

If Gladio noticed the slip, he gave no sign. “I could’ve helped you.”

“I don’t need help taking a piss.”

“Your damn leg’s sliced open!”

“So?!”

Gladio flung up his arms in exasperation. “How the hell did you survive to become the freaking Marshal of the Crownsguard?”

A flush of shame hit Cor, sudden as the backhand from Gilgamesh that had sent him flying across the cave to land in a bone-rattling heap near the entrance to Gilgamesh’s lair. Even two months later, the memory of the moment he’d decided to take the opening and run, abandoning his sword and his honor both, burned like bile in his throat. He’d done what he had to do to survive, to return to Mors and Regis, and he _knew_ it, but he still hated having it thrown at him like that.

He’d hesitated too long. Gladio frowned, irritation giving way to concern. “Cor…”

“I survived,” Cor growled, “because that’s what I _do._ ” The idea of sitting here while Gladio _pitied_ him made him sick, and the shame boiled over to anger. “I ain’t the son of the second most powerful family in the country. I ain’t had fancy training my whole life, in etiquette an’ politics an’ fighting an’ whatever. I ain’t rich enough to talk outcity around the Crown Prince and no one cares. I got here on my _own_ , an’ I’ll keep going on my own. I don’t need _help_. Okay?”

Gladio stared at him. Cor met his gaze, fists clenched, teeth bared, and he saw it when Gladio wavered. For a second it didn’t matter that he was half Gladio’s size and sitting down with an injured leg - _Gladio_ was the one backing down to _Cor_. Even if Cor knew it was probably his older self that Gladio was deferring to, at that moment it was enough.

Gladio took a deep breath, stalking across the haven to stand with his back to Cor. “Stars,” he muttered. “He said you had the strongest will of anyone he’d ever met. Guess he wasn’t kidding.”

Cor frowned at his back. “Who, Clarus?”

“No.” Gladio turned around and met his eyes. “Gilgamesh.”

Cor’s breath caught in his chest and about twenty different questions tangled on his tongue. “Wh—he—you—You met the Blademaster?!”

Gladio nodded and touched a finger to the half-healed horizontal cut along his forehead, then hooked down the collar of his shirt to reveal the top edge of a thick ugly band of fresh scar tissue across his chest. “Couple weeks ago.” He hesitated, then sighed, swung one of the camp chairs closer to Cor, and dropped into it. “Noct’s the Chosen King, and Gilgamesh’s whole deal is to test the mettle of the Chosen King’s Shield.” He folded his hands, staring into the banked fire at the center of the haven. “I got my ass handed to me by the Imperial High Commander. Figured if I couldn’t even handle a punk like that, I had no right to call myself Noct’s Shield. So I took on the Trial of Gilgamesh.”

“And you survived,” Cor breathed, equal parts impressed and jealous.

“Yep.” Gladio’s gaze was still on the fire. “I passed. I’m confident, now, that I can protect Noct when push comes to shove.” He rubbed a hand along the scar on his chest, a quiet pride in his eyes, then looked up at Cor. “Gilgamesh mentioned you, when I fought him. Said you impressed him.”

Cor blinked. “I did? I thought—” He bit off the rest of the sentence. He’d thought Gilgamesh had thrown him to the door out of pity, or maybe a sick sense of punishment. That the ancient guardian spirit had either thought Cor too pathetic to kill, or wanted to humiliate him in revenge for Cor cutting off his arm.

Gladio smiled faintly. “You definitely left an impression.” He held a hand in front of him; blue magic crystallized into the shape of a long katana. Cor’s breath caught as he recognized his own Genji Blade, polished and shining in the sunlight. Gladio added, “He gave me this, when he handed over his power. Think he meant it as a message.”

Cor barely heard him - his hands itched to hold his sword again, and he had to grip the arms of the camp chair to keep from reaching out and snatching it away from Gladio. He missed that sword with his whole body, the way it flowed with him when he moved, the way it sang when he sliced an enemy apart. Then Gladio’s words caught up to him. “A message?”

“Strength of will is as important as strength of body,” Gladio said. “Like I said, you impressed him.”

“Hah,” Cor said. His attention was already back on his sword, drinking in the way the sunlight gleamed off the blade. Gladio had apparently sharpened and polished it; Cor knew how much punishment it had taken during the fight with Gilgamesh, but now it looked almost new. Even the grip had been cleaned, the red leather gleaming in Gladio’s hand, the blue beads of Cor’s Crownsguard emblem sparkling.

“You want it back, huh,” Gladio said quietly. Not exactly a question, and Cor looked up to see Gladio watching him with that odd expression back on his face.

“Yeah,” Cor admitted. “I was so pissed I lost it. I’m still mad, I guess.” Something occurred to him, and he looked up at Gladio. “You didn’t give it back to me already? Future me, I mean.”

“I tried,” Gladio said, and shrugged. “The Marshal told me to keep it.”

Cor frowned at him. “Why?” He couldn’t imagine turning down the chance to have the Genji Blade back.

Gladio shrugged again and tapped the scar on his chest. “Said it made a better souvenir than this.”

“That’s stupid.”

“Is it?” Gladio asked.

Cor bit back his first, snarky response, and just studied Gladio for a second. Gladio had that look Clarus got sometimes, when he was trying to get Cor to understand one of the many subtle political things that came naturally to him and Regis and which were an alien language to Cor. Cor hated that look - it meant he was being tested, and he almost never knew the answer.

Gladio held the blade out again, clearly offering it to Cor. “You gonna take it?”

He didn’t know what response Gladio wanted from him, and that frustrated him, but worse was the sudden doubt that clawed at his stomach. He wanted his sword back so much it hurt, but his future self hadn’t taken it. What did the Marshal know that Cor didn’t?

At the same time, as much as he wanted the sword back just because it was _his_ sword, he also wanted it back because it was a weapon. They would be facing off against that jabberwock again once they had the explosives that would let them clear out the fallen rubble, and Cor’s current sword - a shitty Crownsguard backup weapon he was only using while he tried to save up for another katana - was lost, either buried under that rubble or left behind in the past. He’d feel a hell of a lot better having a sword in hand before going back down there.

Gladio was still holding out the blade. Cor took a deep breath, swallowing the desire to snatch his sword back. Made himself say, “Just… just for now, at least. I lost my sword when the jabberwock brought the wall down, and I’ll need a weapon if we’re gonna fight it again.”

“All right,” Gladio agreed.

“What, you ain’t gonna tell me I’m not allowed to fight?” Cor asked, surprised.

“Would you listen if I did?”

“No.”

Gladio grinned. “So why bother? If you’re gonna fight, might as well give you a good weapon.” He leaned forward enough for Cor to reach over and wrap his hand around the grip of the sword.

The Genji Blade was light in his hand, perfectly balanced, settling into his grip with familiar ease. Cor rested the blade across his thighs, studying its edge for any imperfections. Then something occurred to him. “Where’s its sheath?”

“In the armory,” Gladio said, like it was obvious. “Don’t need to keep it sheathed unless I’m planning to have it out for a while.”

“Well, _I_ don’t have a magic armory,” Cor said, “so can I have the sheath?”

“You don’t—Why the hell not?” Gladio asked. “The Marshal uses the armory.”

“Bully for him,” Cor said. “ _I_ don’t like the idea of my weapon being socked away in some mystical magic pocket where I can’t get at it if something goes wrong.”

“Right.” Gladio cocked an eyebrow at him. “How’s that working out for ya?”

Cor glared. “Gimme the damn sheath.”

Gladio snorted, but the Genji Blade’s sheath appeared in his hand in a shimmer of blue sparks, and he tossed it to Cor. Cor sheathed his sword and settled it beside him, the hilt resting against his shoulder. “How much longer till those explosives get here?”

“Won’t be for a few more hours yet,” Gladio said. “Might as well get some more sleep while you’re waiting. Let that leg heal.”

“Yeah,” Cor agreed. He crossed his arms and slouched down in the chair, the Genji Blade a comforting weight against his shoulder.

He was about to close his eyes when Gladio said quietly, “For the record, the reason I talk outcity is ‘cause I pretty much grew up in the Crownsguard training yard. Whole lotta outcity kids signed up for the ‘Guard after some punk outcity kid got himself made Marshal.”

“Choco shit,” Cor scoffed, but even as he said it he felt a blush spreading over his cheeks.

Gladio touched a fist to his chest. “Crownsguard’s honor.”

“Choco shit,” Cor said again, but when he closed his eyes to sleep, it was with a grin on his face.


	4. Chapter 4

Cor woke up a couple hours later when Ignis and Prompto returned from their foraging trip. They’d apparently done laundry, as well: they had a bag full of damp clothes, including Cor’s own Crownsguard uniform, which they hung up along the tent lines to dry. All the shaking of the tent woke Noctis and he crawled out grumbling, but Ignis said even the Crown Prince oughtn’t nap his days away.

Cor’s leg still hurt, but between his own double nap and the flask of chill blizzard magic, he felt better than he had since regaining consciousness under the rubble in the ruin. He spent the rest of the afternoon asking Noctis and his retinue questions about the fall of Insomnia and the events leading up to it. They knew frustratingly little - apparently Regis and Clarus had deliberately hidden a great deal of vital information from their sons, and Cor privately vowed to tell his friends not to be such idiots in their own timeline. Still, by the time they heard footsteps coming up the path through the woods from the road, he’d put together a decent outline of what had happened. He didn’t know if it would be enough to change his own future, but it was enough to give him a fighting chance.

“Do we know who’s coming?” Prompto asked Ignis from where he stood at the edge of the haven, squinting into the shadows under the trees to spot their visitors.

“Dave just said a friend of a friend,” Ignis said. “I’m not sure he knew the man’s name—”

Then a girl’s voice shouted from within the trees, “I _told_ you it’s them. Hey! Gladdy!”

Gladio’s head snapped up and he crossed the haven in two long strides to stand beside Prompto. “ _Iris?!_ ” he called.

Two figures appeared on the path, heavy bags slung over their shoulders. The first was a slim girl with Gladio’s brown eyes and a skirt short enough that she wouldn’t be allowed in King Mors’ court. The second was… Cor blinked and sat up straighter. The second was Cid Sophiar, thirty years older than Cor remembered, his hair thinner and greyer, his face more heavily lined, but the most familiar and welcome face Cor had seen in days.

“Hey Gladdy!” the girl, presumably Iris, called, waving wildly with her free hand. She hurried up the ramp to the top of the haven, Cid following at an old man’s shuffling pace.

“What in Shiva’s frozen hell are you doing here?” Gladio demanded as they rounded the curve to the top. “You’re supposed to stay at Cape Caem!”

Iris rolled her eyes. “It’s _fine_ , Gladdy. You’re here, nothing’s going to happen.” Then her gaze landed on Cor. “Who’s that?”

Gladio threw his hands up in exasperation. Cor ignored them both in favor of watching Cid, who was staring gape-mouthed. “Titan’s sandy ballsack,” Cid said, shocked. “Ain’t you—”

“Hey, Cid,” Cor said with more levity than he felt. Cid’s voice had gone as rusty as the rest of him, and Cor hadn’t expected it to hurt this much to see a friend so old and wrinkled. “Long time no see.”

“Well, I’ll be,” Cid murmured. “You got younger.”

“Something like that,” Cor said.  

“Wait,” Iris said. “Is that—Are you—”

“Iris Amicitia, meet Cor Leonis, Crownsguard and bodyguard to King Mors,” Ignis spoke up, sounding amused. “Cor, Iris is Clarus’s daughter, Gladio’s younger sister.”

“Pleasure meeting you,” Cor said.

Iris stared at him, mouth open in shock. She was pretty cute, with short brown hair, wide brown eyes framed by long lashes, and that tiny skirt—and then Cor’s brain jumped to _she’s Clarus’s kid_ and _Clarus will murder me_ and he shut down that line of thought before it got any further. Still, he couldn’t help but be annoyed that he was still wearing the stupid chocobo-print pajama pants and cartoon-character shirt, with his leg bandaged and propped up on a chair. If he was going to meet Clarus’s hot daughter, he would’ve rather done it in full uniform, standing up. First impressions were important.

“So you’re Dave’s friend of a friend?” Noctis asked Cid.

Cid tore his eyes off Cor and grinned at Noctis. “Looks like. Ol’ Roger’s a hunter pal of mine. Said a friend of a friend needed explosives to clear out an old ruin.” He hefted the bag on his shoulder. “Takka helps me make ‘em. Useful for blasting new wells out in the desert.”

“Okay,” Gladio said, “but why the hell’d you bring _her_ along?”

“Gladdy!” Iris protested, but Gladio ignored her.

Cid said, “Once she heard where I was takin’ these explosives, she figured it was for you lot. She pestered me to come along, an’ I figured it wouldn’t hurt to have someone ridin’ with me. Keep me company on the road, y’know?”

“Well, it’s certainly good to see you,” Ignis cut in. “And we’re grateful for your assistance.”

“Though, I thought you were still working on the boat,” Noctis added. “Is it ready?”

“Almost,” Cid said. “Mythril’s got a hell of a long cure time. I got all the pieces ready yesterday, but it’ll be another day an’ a half yet afore I can do anything with ‘em.”

“Oh.” Noctis sighed and dropped into a camp chair. As if that was a signal, the others began moving as well: Prompto sitting cross-legged at Noctis’s feet again, Gladio taking the bags from Iris and Cid, Ignis offering Cid the last camp chair to sit in and Cid waving him off…

...and Iris coming to stand beside Cor.

“Uh, hey,” Cor said, then hid a wince. _Smooth_.

“You’re really Cor Leonis?” Iris demanded. She crouched down to be closer to his eye level; up close, her brown eyes were more of a reddish-amber, and sparkled with the same good nature as Clarus’s. Thankfully, that was the only obvious resemblance between them - Iris looked a lot less like Clarus than Gladio did.

“Yeah,” Cor said. He tried to sit up straighter, court-formal, though with his leg propped up there was only so much he could do. His eyes drifted down Iris’s body to the neckline of her shirt, gaping very slightly as she leaned toward him, and he hurriedly refocused on her face.

“So what happened?” she asked. “I mean, when I saw you a few days ago you were a lot older.”

“Yeah,” Cid said. “You ain’t been a kid for years.”

At least looking over at Cid gave Cor an excuse to not look at Iris or her low neckline anymore. “I, uh, I’m kind of from the past. It’s a long story.”

“I’m about to make dinner,” Ignis added. “If you’d like to stay, you can join us and we’ll explain everything.”

Iris immediately spun around to give Gladio big pleading eyes, but Cid shook his head. “We’d love to, but we gotta get up to the Longwythe rest area afore dark. We’re already pushin’ it.” He shook his head. “I know it’s summer, but I swear the days ain’t any longer than they were all winter. Doesn’t leave a lot of time for drivin’ cross-country.”

Prompto frowned. “I thought Cindy was making more of those daemon-repelling headlights.”

“She is,” Cid agreed, “but the first couple sets went to some hunters who needed ‘em more. ‘S why we’re going to Longwythe though, and not back to Cauthess - gonna swing by Hammerhead an’ pick up a set while we’re out.”

“Well,” Ignis said, “I was planning to drive up to Cauthess anyway to restock our curatives before we return to the Solheim ruin tomorrow. Longwythe’s not that much further. Stay for dinner, and I’ll drive up with you. Our headlights are more than enough to keep the daemons away from us both.”

Cid pretended to consider, but Iris turned her puppy-dog eyes on him and he’d clearly lost before he’d even tried. “Sure,” he said.

“Yes!” Iris said, and bounced excitedly. Cor, though, couldn’t help a shiver, and Iris was back by his side immediately. “What’s wrong?” she asked. “Are you cold? Do you need anything?”

Cor shook his head. “I’m fine. It’s just… it ain’t - uh, hasn’t - been more’n a month since King Mors pulled back the Wall to Insomnia.” He saw Cid frowning in confusion and added, “For me, I mean. I don’t like knowing it’s gonna be like this for us, real soon, everyone having to run around in the daylight to keep safe from the daemons.”

“Ol’ Mors did the only thing he could do,” Cid said. “Ain’t nobody outside the Crown City was much pleased about about it, but we made do.” He shrugged. “We’re tough out here. Regis used to be like that, too - underestimatin’ us country folk on the basis of all the softies in the City.”

Noctis snorted. “He got over that by the time I was a kid.”

“An’ I’m glad he did,” Cid said. He stumped over to the camp chair Ignis had offered him and sat down, groaning under his breath. To Cor, he added, “Wouldn’t hurt if you put a bug in his ear sooner, though.”

“Noted,” Cor said. “Anything else I oughta tell him?”

In retrospect, he probably should have known better than to ask that particular question of Cid, but the answers filled up the entire time it took for Ignis to make dinner - some kind of rich nutty casserole thing which smelled heavenly. When Ignis called, “Dinner’s ready,” Iris jumped to her feet from where she’d been sitting next to Cor on the stone ground of the haven, her legs tucked demurely under her.

“I’ll get you a plate,” she said to Cor. “Just wait right there.”

“Thanks,” Cor said, and tried to ignore the side-eye Gladio was shooting his way. It wasn’t Cor’s fault Iris was being attentive.

Iris was apparently immune to Gladio’s annoyance; she continued to dote on Cor throughout the meal, _ooh_ ing and _ahh_ ing as he told the story of how he’d got here, looking appropriately wide-eyed at the description of the fight with the jabberwock, and generally hanging on his every word. It was kind of nice - Cor didn’t even have to ask for anything before she was offering it to him - but he was getting sick and tired of being unable to do anything for himself, and he was privately relieved when the casserole dish ran empty and Ignis called Iris over to help him with the cleanup. Cor watched her go - _damn_ that was a short skirt, and maybe Cor wasn’t gonna tell Clarus about this entire thing because as long as he didn’t think about Iris being Clarus’s daughter, it was real nice to admire the view.

When Iris disappeared behind the tent with an armload of plates to scrape over the side of the haven, Cor finally looked away - only to find Gladio glaring at him. Cor answered with a shrug and what he hoped was a _women, whatcha gonna do_ smirk. Apparently that wasn’t the response Gladio was looking for, because his eyes narrowed.

Before he could say anything, though, Prompto bounced into view, holding his camera out. “Hey!” he said. “We need to get a picture of everyone while we’re all here.”

“...what?” Cor said, thrown.

Prompto waved the camera. “How cool is this? You’re here from the past, and Cid’s here, and all the rest of us. We have _got_ to get a picture to commemorate the occasion!”

“That’s a lot of big words,” Noctis teased. “You’re starting to sound like Vyv.”

“Am I wrong?” Prompto asked, undeterred. “You know you want this photo.”

Noctis grinned. “Yeah, it’s a good idea. Specs! Iris! C’mon, we’re gonna take a picture.”

“It can wait until we’re done cleaning up,” Ignis retorted without turning from where he was scraping leftover food scraps into a bag.

“No it can’t,” Prompto protested. “The sun’s about to set. If we wait any longer it’ll be too dark for a good picture.”

“You take pictures after dark all the time,” Gladio said.

“Yeah, _slice-of-life_ pics,” Prompto said, with all the air of a highcity noble looking at an outcity food cart. “This is for _posterity_. It’s gotta have good lighting!”

Noctis laughed, and for a second Cor was thrown by how much he sounded like Aulea, though he looked like Regis, his head tilting back and his eyes crinkling with mirth. “Gotta listen to the royal photographer, Gladio,” he said. “You too, Specs.”

Ignis harrumphed, but he’d already wiped off his hands and started to roll his sleeves back down. Iris appeared from behind the tent and made a beeline for Cor, but Gladio managed to get there first, wrapping an arm around her and firmly keeping her on the other side of him from Cor. Prompto had produced a tripod from somewhere and was setting up the camera, while the rest of them gathered around Cor. At the last second Cor realized they were using him with his damn foot propped up like the photo’s centerpiece, and grabbed Gladio’s arm to haul himself up onto his good leg. Noctis, on Cor’s other side, hooked a steadying arm around his shoulders, while Prompto shoved both chairs aside and Ignis steered Cid to a spot just in front of Cor and Noctis.

Prompto pushed a button on the camera, then hurried around to stand next to Cid between Ignis and Noctis. The camera’s flash went off, and Prompto said, “Once more, just in case.” Another button push and rush back into place, another flash, and this time when Prompto checked the little screen on the back of the camera, his face lit up. “Perfect!” he announced.

“Good,” Ignis said as Gladio snagged the camp chair back and pushed Cor into it. “Now you can help Gladio finish cleaning up. If Cid and Iris are to get to Longwythe at a reasonable hour, we need to leave now.”

“Actually, I wanted to come with you,” Prompto said. “I have some stuff I’ve been meaning to pick up the next time we hit a rest stop.”

“Go ahead,” Gladio said to them. “Noct and I’ll take care of cleanup.”

“Hey!” Noctis protested.

Gladio cuffed him lightly on the head. “You eat, you help clean up,” he said.

Noctis snorted, but pushed to his feet with an exaggerated groan. “Yeah, yeah,” he said.

“We’ll be back before midnight,” Ignis told them as he and Prompto headed down the ramp at the side of the haven. “If you need anything, just call.” Then they were gone, vanishing into the deepening shadows under the trees.  

“Cid, Iris,” Noctis said. “Thanks for bringing those explosives. And say hi to Cindy for us.”

“Sure thing,” Cid answered. “I oughta have that boat done in three, four days, so you be ready, y’hear?”

“Will do,” Noctis agreed.

Cid turned to Cor. “Good seein’ you again,” he said. “Seein’ you young, I mean. We all went and got old and crotchety.”

“You’ve always been old and crotchety,” Cor teased.

Cid chuckled. “True enough,” he admitted. “You tell Reggie and Clarus about all this, y’hear? Make sure they know what’s comin’. Maybe you can’t change it for us, but if there’s another timeline out there that don’t have to go through this…” He trailed off, wizened face turning sad.

“I’ll do everything I can,” Cor promised. He reached out a hand; Cid clasped it, then to Cor’s surprise, leaned in to give him an awkward hug.

“Take care, kid,” Cid said gruffly.

“You too, old man,” Cor answered. To Iris he added, “Keep an eye on him, okay? Make sure he doesn’t work too hard.”

Iris grinned. “I don’t think anything can keep him from working,” she said. “But I’ll try.” She hesitated, looking down, her hands clasped behind her back. “It was really nice meeting you,” she added, peeking back up at him from beneath her eyelashes.

 _Clarus’s kid,_ Cor reminded himself. “You, uh, you too,” he stammered.

Gladio came to his rescue then, giving Iris a not-so-gentle shove toward the ramp down from the haven. “Get going,” he said. “You ain’t got much daylight left to get back to the car.”

“Gladdy!” Iris protested, but folded under Gladio’s stern glare. Taking Cid’s arm, she headed down the ramp. “Bye, Cor!” she called over her shoulder.

“Bye,” Cor called back. He tossed what he hoped was a casual wave, and firmly ignored Gladio when he turned that glare on Cor.

“I see what you meant before,” Noctis said to Gladio once Iris and Cid were out of earshot. His eyes were sparkling in the firelight, making him look like Aulea laughing at a courtier’s joke.

Gladio huffed and folded his arms. “It went better than I expected, is all I’m gonna say.”

Cor looked between them. “What? What are you guys talking about?”

“Nothing,” Noctis said, too quickly, and shared a grin with Gladio.

“What?!” Cor demanded.

Gladio just laughed. “I’ll tell you when you’re older.”

Cor glared at them both. “I’m _sixteen_. I know about lockin’ legs and swappin’ gravy.” He was rewarded by Noctis going cross-eyed in confusion at the outcity slang, and barreled on without waiting for him to figure it out: “You were expecting Iris to go dizzy over me?”

“She’s crushing on the Marshal,” Gladio admitted reluctantly, “but he’s too old for her and she knows it. I kinda figured she might latch onto you.”

“I know what Clarus’d do to me if I made a move on his kid,” Cor said. “I ain’t pushing my luck.”

“Good,” Gladio said. “Remember that.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Cor made a face at him and slouched lower in his chair, folding his arms and half-closing his eyes like he was about to go to sleep. He waited until Gladio turned away to start washing the dinner dishes, then added, just barely loud enough for Gladio to hear, “She _is_ hot though.”

Gladio winged a spoon at him. Cor caught it, tossed it back, and smirked.


	5. Chapter 5

Cor got to sleep in the tent that night; apparently his injury meant he got priority over everyone except Noctis, and anyway Gladio claimed he didn’t mind sleeping under the stars with the chocobos, who’d been brought up into the haven’s protective aura once night fell. It was weird as hell, though - Cor was used to sharing a tent with his own friends, and everything about sharing with Noctis and Ignis and Prompto instead was just slightly to the left of normal. He spent more time awake than sleeping, listening to them breathing and shifting around, wondering if Regis and Clarus were okay, if his future self was with them. Eventually he managed to doze off, and woke when Ignis announced breakfast.

Cor’s ankle still hurt like a bitch, but when Ignis checked under the bandages after breakfast, he declared it well on its way to healing, so long as Cor continued to take it easy. Ignis also applied another dose of hunters’ salve from the stock he’d picked up last night, since Cor made it clear he wasn’t about to take it easy when there was a jabberwock that needed killing.

When Ignis was done playing field medic, Cor pulled on his Crownsguard uniform, cleansed of the dirt, sweat, and blood that had accumulated during the fight with the jabberwock and however long he’d spent trapped under the rubble. Someone - probably Ignis again - had even mended the various rips and tears, so it looked halfway decent. Cor buckled the Genji Blade onto his belt and limped out of the tent.

“Well, look at you, ain’t you stubborn,” Gladio said.

Cor scowled at him. “What do you want me to do, crawl on my hands and knees?”

“No,” Gladio said, then in one swift motion, scooped Cor up and hung him over his shoulder.

“Hey!” Cor yelped. “Put me down!”

“You’re right you ain’t crawling,” Gladio said easily, “but you ain’t walking either, not on that leg.”

Cor thumped him in the kidney, not hard enough to do damage but enough to make the point. Gladio just shifted him to dangle further down, his feet sticking almost straight up, his face level with Gladio’s ass. Blood rushed to Cor’s head and the world spun sickeningly, and for a moment he had to concentrate on not throwing up. “Jackass,” he muttered.

“The thing about Iris,” Noctis said conversationally from somewhere overhead, “is that she might look sweet and harmless, but she’s still an Amicitia. I’ve watched her kick MTs into the ground. And Gladio’s been wrangling her since she was a baby.”

Cor twisted enough to glare up at him. “You think I can’t get away just ‘cause Gladio’s got a kid sister? I wrestle _Clarus_ in training.”

“It’s not that we think you can’t get away,” Ignis cut in. “It’s that you ought to consider on whom you’d like to spend your energy for fighting: Gladio, or the jabberwock.”

He had a point, damn him. Cor could think of at least six ways to escape Gladio’s hold, but he’d need to avoid getting thrown right back up there, and he could only do so much on a bum leg against four guys bigger than him. He sighed. “Man, Cid said I got crotchety when I got old. Now I see why - it’s from putting up with you assholes.”

“Believe me,” Ignis said dryly. “You haven’t seen half of it.”

“If I’m not well-behaved, isn’t that the fault of the royal advisor?” Noctis teased.

“Advisor, not babysitter,” Ignis corrected. “Though there have been days - no, months - where I’ve wondered—”

“Hey!”

They kept bickering good-naturedly as Gladio swung Cor around and up into the saddle of one of the chocobos. “You’re riding with Prompto,” he said. “The two of you doubled up shouldn’t be a problem for this bird.” Gladio patted the chocobo’s neck, then went to check the saddle on his own mount.

Prompto bounced up next to Cor then, his hands behind his back and a big grin on his face. Cor eyed him warily. “You look like the cat that ate the canary.”

Prompto laughed and pulled his hands in front of him, showing off a printed photo. “This is for you. The guy at Longwythe let me use his printer while Iggy was shopping last night. Here!”

Cor took the photo and studied it. It was the one they’d taken last night, Noctis and his retinue along with Cor, Cid, and Iris. It was surprisingly well-shot, the sunset lighting adding a warm flush to counter the cool blue glow of the haven’s runes, everyone looking at the camera and smiling. It was still weird to see Cid old like that, and all too easy to want to see Regis and Clarus in place of Noctis and Gladio, but Cor found he didn’t mind. The only downside was that you could clearly see the stupid chocobo-print pajama pants Cor had been wearing, but there was no help for that now. He’d just have to make sure Clarus and Regis never noticed - they wouldn’t let him live that down.

He tucked the photo into the inner breast pocket of his uniform jacket. “Thanks,” he said to Prompto, and meant it.

Prompto beamed, and started chattering about the setup for the shot, the angle and the lighting and the shutter speed and things Cor had no idea about. He kept it up as they led the chocobos down off the haven, loaded up the explosives, and got mounted. The plan was to ride out to the ruin, go in and clear out the jabberwock and anything else that might try to jump them, then retrieve the explosives from the chocobos and blast their way into the Solheim magitek control room. Straightforward enough, though none of them had any illusions about it being easy.

The ride to the ruin took a little more than an hour, which had sounded short when they left. But by the time they reached a low cliff overlooking the ruin, Cor’s leg was burning with pain and he was clinging to Prompto harder than he liked to admit. His relief when Noctis pulled his chocobo to a halt and swung down to the ground only lasted until Cor realized _he_ had to get down somehow, too - but both ways down involved putting weight on his bad leg. Prompto had already jumped down and joined Noctis and Ignis at the edge of the little cliff, which meant Cor couldn’t use him for balance. He was debating whether he could hike his good leg over the chocobo’s back for a one-legged jump when Gladio stepped in front of him and held out his arms.

Cor gritted his teeth. “Say _nothing_ ,” he hissed.

Gladio’s eyes sparkled, but he obligingly kept his mouth shut as he lifted Cor out of the saddle and set him down on his good leg behind Noctis. Cor had to grip Noctis’s shoulder to balance, but Noctis didn’t seem to notice. He had a hand on his back, knuckles digging into a spot just to the left of his spine, but his gaze was intent as he surveyed the land below. Cor leaned forward, peering past him, and his eyes went wide when he saw the Imperial camp stretched out around the ruin. In his own time, a camp like this would’ve been impossible, the Niffs held back by the Wall—

 _Not anymore_ , Cor reminded himself. Mors had had to pull back the Wall, sacrificing the countryside for the sake of the seat of power and the Crystal it protected. In less than thirty years, Imperial bases in Lucis would be so common that Regis’s son wouldn’t bat an eye at them. Cor’s stomach tightened and he clenched a fist at his side. _Not if I can help it._

“The MTs are still on patrol,” Ignis observed, breaking into Cor’s thoughts. “We know now they’ve no controller - we could probably take them out with little risk.”

Noctis nodded. “Take Gladio,” he ordered. A silver-and-black handgun materialized in his hand in a shower of glittering blue. “Prompto and I’ll stay up here and provide cover fire.”

Ignis and Gladio both looked sharply at him. Noctis frowned back. “What?”

“Usually you’re rushing in, not hanging back to ‘provide cover fire’,” Gladio said skeptically.

Noctis rolled his eyes, finishing the motion with a jerk of his head toward Cor. “Not all of us can rush in right now, and you’re terrible with guns.”

Cor gave Noctis a shove. “Hey!” He was about to say more when he saw the flicker of pain in Noctis’s eyes as he caught his balance from the shove, and abruptly remembered how Noctis had been rubbing his back a few seconds ago, how he’d fallen into the chair yesterday. Cor swallowed the rest of his protest and settled instead for folding his arms across his chest in what he hoped was a realistic-looking sulk.

Fortunately, it seemed to work. Gladio chuckled and socked Cor lightly in the arm. “Save all that energy for the jabberwock, big guy.”

“Don’t push your luck, _Gladdy_ ,” Cor shot back.

Prompto and Noctis both snickered, and even Ignis cracked a smile. Noctis said to Gladio, “Better get going. Their patrol is about to cycle again.”

Gladio rolled his eyes, but didn’t protest further as he followed Ignis down the side of the cliff. Prompto materialized his own gun, but held it down by his side, eyes on the MTs striding along the camp’s perimeter. Not until a pair of daggers flew out of the trees to strike an MT in the throat, indicating Ignis and Gladio were well out of earshot, did Prompto say to Noctis, “Is it that bad today?”

Noctis shrugged, though the motion wasn’t quite as casual as he’d probably hoped. “Dunno why, but the ramp in there—” with a nod toward the hole in the ground— “was hell on my back.”

“Steep angle,” Prompto suggested. He sounded less concerned about the whole thing than Ignis and Gladio had been yesterday, but Cor didn’t miss the fact that he was staying within grabbing range.  

“I was hoping it would’ve gone away by now, but…” Noctis trailed off, a rueful twist to his lips.

Cor eyed him. “You gonna be up for fighting down there?”

Noctis raised an eyebrow right back. “More than you. I’m at least not actively bleeding.”

“Active’s a strong word,” Cor said. “Hunter’s salve’s keeping it closed.”

“Well, make sure it stays closed,” Noctis said dryly, then added, “I think they’re done. Let’s go.”

Cor looked down at the camp. Sure enough, Ignis and Gladio stood out in the open near the big hole, waving up at them. Glancing back at Noctis, he said, “I hope you aren’t planning to throw me over your shoulder.”

Noctis and Prompto both grinned; Prompto said, “I don’t think either of us can do that, but I can carry you piggyback if you want.”

That was nearly as embarrassing than being dumped over Gladio’s shoulder like a sack of potatoes, but it was more practical than either other option, which were Cor trying to walk on his own and burning all his energy before they ever laid eyes on the damn jabberwock; or slinging an arm over each of their shoulders and hopping between them. He sighed. “I bet future me doesn’t have to deal with this shit.”

“When I was… I don’t know, eleven or twelve,” Noctis said, “my dad showed up for court for the first time in _forever_ without Clarus. When I asked, he said Clarus had had to rush the Marshal to the hospital that morning. Apparently you’d - he’d - whatever, gone exploring in some old outcity warehouse scheduled for demolition, and fallen through the floor and broken his wrist and like three ribs. Publicly it was just written off as a training accident, but my dad and Clarus teased him about it for _months_.”

Cor scowled down at him from where he’d managed to get up on Prompto’s back. “That’s supposed to make me feel better?”

Noctis just grinned, his eyes sparkling in that way that made him look like Aulea, and set out toward the camp. Prompto shifted his grip on Cor’s legs and followed.

In Cor’s timeline, the old ruin had been revealed when an especially heavy spring rain opened a sinkhole above it. He and Regis and Clarus had had to tie ropes to trees and lower themselves down into the sinkhole, then dig through the remaining mud and dirt to get inside the ruin itself. He didn’t know if the Niffs had found this place via the same sinkhole or what, but they’d opened it up and built a ramp to get down, which was a hell of a lot nicer than rappelling. Still, they were only halfway down before Noctis started walking with a noticeable limp, and Ignis called a halt.

“Your back hasn’t been this bad in years,” he said, while Noctis leaned on the wall and dug his knuckles into his spine. “Perhaps you should wait this one out.”

Noctis shook his head. “You need me down there to warp out of the time shift,” he reminded them. “I’m fine.”

“Weird that it’s acting up now, though,” Prompto said. “I know I said it might just be the angle of the ramp but… this isn’t a weird angle. It’s long, sure, but it’s not extra-steep or anything.”

“Dunno,” Noctis said, and shrugged one shoulder. “Maybe all the sleeping on hard stone havens is finally getting to me.”

Gladio snorted. “You ain’t that much of a wuss.”

Noctis made a face that was probably supposed to be a smile, but ended up mostly a grimace. It was the same face Regis had made whenever he touched the walls of the ruin, and Cor froze in realization. “Hey, Noctis,” he said. “You can feel the magic in here, can’t you?”

“Huh?” Noctis blinked, then ran a hand over the wall behind him. “Yeah. It’s… it’s weird. Old.”

“Regis said something about it,” Cor said. “Said it felt like it was trying to latch onto him, and he was having to keep it out.” He’d forgotten, what with everything that had happened since Regis had mentioned it when they first entered the ruin.

“Keep it out?” Gladio repeated. “What’s that mean?”

“Dunno, I ain’t the one with magic.”

“Are you, er, _blocking_ the magic, Noct?” Ignis asked.

Noctis shook his head. “I… don’t even know what that means.”

“Try to figure it out,” Ignis urged. “If this place is somehow latching onto your magic, that could be why you’re having so much trouble with your back.”

“Yeah,” Noctis agreed. He pushed off the wall, though his hands trailed behind him like he didn’t want to lose contact with it. Gladio grabbed him by the arm and hauled him away, then planted himself between Noctis and the wall. Not that that would do much good when magic was involved, but it was exactly like what Clarus would’ve done.

They kept going down the ramp, Gladio keeping himself between Noctis and the wall, Noctis with an expression of concentration as he tried to do whatever magic thing Regis had done to shield himself from the ruin’s effects. Getting down through the opening at the bottom of the pit wasn’t fun with Noctis distracted and Prompto still carrying Cor piggyback, but they managed it, and finally came to a stop in the small antechamber leading into the big spiral hall down the center of the ruin.

“Where do you think the jabberwock is?” Prompto asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

“It can’t fit through most of the doorways in here,” Ignis pointed out. “It’s most likely wandering the central hall.”

They all fell silent, listening, but the ruin was eerily quiet. “Maybe it’s sleeping,” Cor suggested.

“Do daemons sleep?” Prompto said.

Noctis shrugged. Ignis said, “Unlikely. It may be lying in wait. We’ll need to be careful.”

“We always are,” Gladio said. “C’mon, standing here flapping our lips ain’t gonna get us any closer.”

He led the way through the antechamber door into the central spiral hallway, the rest of them following. It was odd to see the ruin like this, cleaned out and lit up by the Niffs. In Cor’s timeline, they’d had to light their own way with lamps, and the place had been full of daemons. The Niffs’ lights were sputtering and dying, but were apparently still enough to keep away any daemons smaller than that damn jabberwock.

They circled the central column once, twice, the hair on the back of Cor’s neck standing at attention, his skin crawling with nerves. They should have heard the jabberwock by now. The thing was the size of a small house; it wasn’t exactly built for stealth. But there was nothing - not the angry thumping which had been Cor’s constant companion under the rubble, no angry howls, not even the scrape of claws on stone.

Another curve around the column. This far down, the Niffs’ lights were completely dead, the only illumination coming from the jacket lights Noctis and his retinue wore. Shadows danced wildly along the walls, making it hard to tell which dark areas were openings to the rooms on the outside of the hall, and which were just shadows. Cor squinted, trying to make out shapes—  

Then something massive shot out of the darkness, snatched Gladio, and vanished.

“Gladio!” Noctis yelled, his sword appearing in his hand.

Cor shoved down off Prompto’s back, drawing the Genji Blade and ignoring the spike of pain up his leg as he put weight on his bad ankle. Noctis and the others ran forward to face the shadows that held whatever had grabbed Gladio, and their jacket lights fell on a gaping hole in the outer wall of the hallway. The jabberwock crouched within, its beak in the air as it tried to swallow Gladio.

“Light it up!” Noctis called, drawing his arm back to throw his sword.

“On it!” Prompto shouted back. His gun appeared in his hand and boomed, deafening in the enclosed hall, and an instant later a brilliant light burst above the jabberwock’s head. Noctis flung his sword and warped into its exposed chest, striking once and flipping back. The jabberwock choked, coughed, and spit Gladio out. He hit the floor near Cor and rolled to his feet, greatsword materializing in his hand. In the still-shining light of Prompto’s sunburst, Cor saw he was covered with black daemon goo and bleeding from several deep cuts around his waist and arms, but he stood steady as he faced the jabberwock.

“You okay?” Cor demanded.

“Fine,” Gladio said. “Shoved a sword down its gullet. Didn’t like it much.”

“Guess not.”

“Less chatter, more fighting, please,” Ignis yelled from further down the hallway, where he was flinging daggers toward the jabberwock.

Gladio dashed forward, sword swinging behind him to wind up for a leaping strike. Cor took two steps, intending to follow - when Clarus used that kind of attack, he tended to leave himself open and Cor normally followed him in to cover him - but agony spiked up his injured leg and he staggered. He caught himself on the wall, barely managing not to scrape the Genji Blade’s fine edge along the stone ground, and snarled in frustration.

Gladio had struck and landed already, Noctis warping in to guard his back. Prompto fired a staccato burst of shots and Ignis darted under the jabberwock’s head to try to get at its chest. But the damn thing was planted firmly in the hole in the wall, only its head and clawed front legs exposed, like the worst kind of Galahdian snapping turtle. They could try to just run past it, but the explosives were still up with the chocobos, and anyway if the jabberwock had made itself that nest, it could almost certainly get out and chase them. No, they had to kill it here. Somehow.

A sword shot past him to stick in the stone floor, then Noctis came flying after it, blue warp magic fading around him as he landed and cursed - he must have aimed for the jabberwock and missed. He ripped the sword free and started to run back toward the fight, even as the jabberwock turned to him. Its huge beak snapped down, Noctis sidestepped and raised his arm to throw his sword again—

—and fell hard to the floor as his left leg gave out.

Cor could’ve sworn the damn jabberwock _smiled_ , its beak opening wide to reveal rows of serrated teeth. It snapped again, those teeth going straight for Noctis where he lay on the ground. He was struggling to get up, but he’d lost a precious few seconds to the surprise of falling, and there was no way he was going to move in time.

“ _Noct!_ ” Gladio bellowed, but he was all the way on the jabberwock’s other side, too far away to help. Ignis and Prompto yelled too, but Cor barely heard them. He could see all of it clearly, the only thing he could do. Pushing off the wall behind him, ignoring the burning screaming pain in his leg, he darted forward to stand above Noctis, Genji Blade braced before him.

The impact shocked him, teeth clicking together, skull rattling, and his boots sliding backward over the stone. For a horrible second he thought he was going to slide right into Noctis and trip, but then Noctis grabbed him by the legs and braced. It was just barely enough: the jabberwock reared back, howling, and Cor grinned in vicious satisfaction when he spotted the deep gouges in the thing’s beak where the Genji Blade had bit in.

Without looking back, he held a hand behind him; Noctis grabbed it and hauled himself to his feet. The others were frantically trying to get the jabberwock’s attention, but it had fixed on Cor and Noctis, its beady eyes glittering in the light of Noctis’s jacket lamp. It snapped at them again and Cor slashed at it with the Genji Blade - but this time the thing bit down on the blade, ripping it from Cor’s hand and flinging it away into the darkness.

Before Cor could react, the jabberwock came at them once more. Noctis grabbed Cor and pulled him tight against his chest with one arm, even as he summoned a massive shield onto the other. The jabberwock’s beak hit the shield and Noctis staggered, his bad leg clearly about to give out again. Cor wriggled in Noctis’s grip enough to get his own arm braced against the shield - they might only have two working legs between them, but it was enough to hold off the jabberwock. For an unpleasant second he was glad he was still little - the muscular, six-foot-plus Marshal in Prompto’s photos wouldn’t have fit behind the shield with Noctis.

The jabberwock’s next bite managed to get its teeth around the edges of the shield, and Noctis let it vanish in a shower of blue sparks, tugging on Cor so they both fell to the ground and away from the jabberwock’s beak snapping in confusion. Another sunburst bullet flared to life overhead, finally getting the damn thing’s attention off them. Noctis pushed himself upright and held a hand out for Cor.

“We need to get it out of there,” Noctis panted as he stood. “We can’t hurt it while it’s protected like that.”

“No shit,” Cor shot back. His leg was a single giant spike of pain, but he gritted his teeth and shoved the pain to the back of his mind. He had to focus or they’d have a lot worse to deal with. “Any ideas?”

“Can’t outrun it, we only did last time ‘cause we dropped it in the hole and got a head start.” Noctis called a gun to his hand and snapped off several shots to distract the thing from trying to bite Prompto.

“An’ it can smash through the walls if we try that again,” Cor agreed.

“Yeah,” Noctis said, then his eyes narrowed. “Wait.”

Cor followed his gaze to the rubble piled around the bottom of the hole in the wall - and then to the ground beneath it, cracked from the weight of the jabberwock and the lack of support from the walls the creature had broken away. “Can you break it?” he asked Noctis.

“They can,” Noctis said, then raised his voice to shout at his friends. “Guys! The floor!”

“What?!” Prompto shouted back, but Ignis’s eyes lit up in realization.

“Use your saw,” Ignis told him, pointing toward the cracks. “I’ll help where I can. Gladio, cover us.”

“Right,” Prompto said, and Gladio grunted agreement. Prompto summoned a huge… _thing_ to his hands, some kind of weird machine with a huge circular saw that revved to life as he dove forward, under the jabberwock’s grasping claws.

Cor reached for the Genji Blade, but his hand found an empty scabbard and he swore. “I need a sword,” he said to Noctis.

“Where’s the Genji Blade?”

“Bastard ripped it out of my hands.”

Noctis made the same face Gladio had on realizing Cor wasn’t using the armory, then shook his head and held out a hand. “I got it. Here.”

The Genji Blade materialized in his grip, and Cor took it and sheathed it. “Guess that magic armory’s good for something after all.”

“I like to think so,” Noctis agreed. “Ready?”

Cor looked over at the others. Gladio was harrying the jabberwock by repeatedly smashing it in the face with a shield, much to its obvious annoyance, while below its stubby forelegs, Prompto and Ignis chipped at the floor. More cracks spiderwebbed around them, the broken stone groaning as it struggled to support the weight of the jabberwock and the rubble. “Let’s do it.”

Noctis wrapped an arm around Cor again, holding him tight to his chest, and Cor knotted his hands in Noct’s jacket. With his free hand, Noctis summoned his own sword and flung it up into the ceiling above the jabberwock’s head - then warped.

Cor had never warped before; Regis wasn’t nearly as fond of it as Noctis seemed to be, and they hadn’t yet gotten around to trying it. The sensation was a bizarre mix of nausea and vertigo, the world going swimmy around him for a second before slamming back to solidity. They dangled directly above the jabberwock’s head, Noctis gripping his sword and Cor clinging to Noctis. Below them, the stone floor gave a deep rumbling groan, then, even as Prompto and Ignis darted back to safety, gave way under the jabberwock’s weight.

It plunged down with a surprised howl, forelegs scrabbling at the stone, its head tipping back as it struggled to balance on the collapsing floor. Noctis yelled, “Now!” and let his sword vanish.

Cor shoved away from Noctis, drawing the Genji Blade as he plummeted down toward the jabberwock’s head. The creature froze for just an instant, clearly not expecting to see them above it, and that instant was enough. Cor drove his sword point-first into the jabberwock’s eye even as Noct did the same on its other side.

The thing shrieked in agony, tossing its head. Cor braced his feet and angled the sword up, feeling it grate against bone until suddenly it didn’t, then shoved the blade in to the hilt. The jabberwock spasmed hard enough to send him flying; he hit something hard and went down in a tangle of limbs. A groan told him it was Gladio who’d caught him, and a quick glance around showed Noctis safe on the opposite wall of the hallway, dangling from his sword again and surrounded by the fading blue shimmer of warp magic.

The jabberwock thrashed and Gladio summoned a shield above them as more stone rained down around them. Cor curled tight under the shield, a sudden horrible memory of being buried under a mountain of rubble making his stomach twist with terror. But it only lasted a moment. The jabberwock went still, and the hail of stone trickled down to a sprinkle of dust.

Gladio sat up, lifting Cor off him and dismissing the shield. “Everyone all right?”

“All good here,” Noctis said, and dropped down from the wall, his sword vanishing in a shower of blue sparks.

“Likewise,” Ignis reported from where he and Prompto had retreated further down the hall, away from the jabberwock’s dying throes.

Cor opened his mouth to agree, but pain spiked up his leg and he swallowed a whimper instead, curling around his leg. Gladio said, “That’s what you get for fighting on that ankle, dumbass.”

“Did you just call _Cor the Immortal_ a _dumbass?!_ ” Prompto demanded, sounding horrified. Cor lifted his head to scowl at him, but honestly he was kind of flattered at how offended Prompto was on his behalf.

“Am I wrong?” Gladio asked, though there was no heat in his voice. “Just ‘cause he eventually developed some sense doesn’t mean he wasn’t a stupid kid.”

“Stupid kid who killed your jabberwock for you,” Cor said, and forced a grin out past the pain.

Gladio dropped a hand on Cor’s shoulder to give him a fond shake, so much like Clarus it hurt. “I think Noct helped a little.”

Noctis shrugged. “I have one jabberwock kill under my belt already. He wants this one, he can have it.”

“Besides, I believe technically it’s your jabberwock, not ours,” Ignis pointed out. He knelt beside Cor and briskly checked over the bandages around his ankle. “Bleeding again, but not badly. You’re going to lie back and keep your foot elevated while Prompto and I retrieve the explosives.”

Cor opened his mouth to protest, but thought better of it at Ignis’s narrow-eyed glare. “Sure,” he said instead. “All that jumping around, I could use a nap.”

“I like the sound of that,” Noctis said. He sat down against the wall and closed his eyes.

“Don’t get too comfortable, princess,” Gladio teased. “They ain’t gonna be gone that long.”

“Long enough,” Cor said. Ignis had finished propping Cor’s leg up on a piece of fallen stone, and Cor leaned back, giving an exaggerated yawn and stretch. “Wake me up when it’s time to blow stuff up.”


	6. Chapter 6

“Well,” Prompto said. “The good news is that I don’t think we damaged anything when we blasted our way in here. The bad news is, I have no idea how to make it work.”

Noctis snorted and cuffed Prompto lightly in the head. “Giving up already?”

Cid’s explosives had worked perfectly on the mound of rubble blocking the entrance to the control room. They’d waited for the dust to settle, then made their way inside. Just like Cor had described, the room was full of glowing columns and tubes and other indescribable Solheim technology, all glowing with pulsing red and blue lights. Unfortunately, there was no obvious control panel, or any convenient buttons labeled “push here to time travel”.

“Me? Give up?” Prompto demanded, mock-offended. “No way! But it might take me a while.”

“Don’t take too long,” Cor complained from where he sat on a stray block of stone. He was putting on a good show, but it was clear his injured leg was hurting him. “I wanna get home.” Belatedly he added, “Not that I don’t like you guys, but…”

“No, we get it, you don’t like us,” Gladio teased, and ruffled Cor’s beret.

Cor glared up at him, pointedly resettling his cap. “And you wonder why?”

Noctis laughed. “He’s just enjoying being older than you. The Marshal used to do that to him.”

Cor’s expression turned wicked and Gladio groaned. “Oh, great, you gave him _ideas_.”

“You’re my Shield, I gotta keep you on your toes somehow,” Noctis said.

“ _You_ , keep _me_ on my toes?” Gladio scoffed. “I’d like to see you try.”

“You challenging me, Amicitia?” Noctis asked lightly. He didn’t actually think he was up for another fight in this damn ruin, even a friendly one - it was taking half his concentration just to beat back the grasping fingers of Solheim magic enough to keep his bad leg from collapsing - but he wasn’t about to let Gladio get away with that.

Fortunately, Prompto saved him. “I think I got something!”

“Yeah?” Noctis crossed the room to where Prompto and Ignis stood beside a broad metal panel. Blue lights danced under Prompto’s fingers as he traced his hands along the surface, and more lights flickered in the surrounding columns.

“It’s weird,” Prompto said absently. “I’m not sure—Ow!” He yelped and jumped back, shaking out his hands like he’d been stung.

Noctis caught him, feeling the fading current of magic running through Prompto’s body. “You okay?”

“Fine,” Prompto said, though his eyes had gone wide. He looked down at his hands and winced. “I don’t think it wants me touching it anymore, though. You’re going to have to do it.”

“Me?” Noctis frowned.

At the same time, Ignis shook his head and said, “No. Whatever the goal of the magic in this place, it’s clearly harming Noctis.”

“Not anymore,” Noctis pointed out. “I’m holding it off. And it didn’t sound like it hurt my dad either.”

“Regis didn’t say anything about it hurting, just that he needed to hold it off,” Cor said.

“It’s fine, Iggy,” Noctis said, then turned to shoot Gladio a pointed look where his Shield had come to loom protectively beside him. “It might just need magic to work.”

Without waiting for either of them to object further, he stepped up to the panel Prompto had been examining, and laid his hands on it. Magic tingled under his palms, up his arms, making his back teeth itch, and he had to fight the urge to jerk away. This was nothing like the old, dying magic in the upper part of the ruin - this was active, snapping and tugging at Noctis’s own magic like a fish on the line. He let it, playing it like a particularly stubborn catch, easing it toward him even as it tried to pull him away.

Closer, closer… _there_. Noctis couldn’t have explained exactly what it was he sensed, but something had changed - the ruin’s magic deepening somehow. The lights still pulsing around them flickered, swirling into new patterns. Closing his eyes, leaning into the wall, Noctis felt magic building up slowly in the columns around him. “I think I got it,” he breathed.

“Good.” A heavy hand landed on his shoulder and hauled him away from the wall. “Now stop letting it eat your magic.”

Noctis rolled his eyes at Gladio. “I’m not!”

“You should get ready,” Cor said. He’d pushed himself up from the stone he’d been sitting on, balancing carefully on his good leg. “It wasn’t more’n five minutes between Regis touching the wall and the jabberwock bringing everything down.”

“Right,” Ignis agreed. “You’re ready, then?”

“Very,” Cor said emphatically, then hesitated, rubbing the back of his head. “Um. Thanks, for, uh. Everything.”

“No problem,” Noctis said. He held out a hand and Cor clasped it. “Take care of my dad and Clarus, okay?”

Cor grinned, then placed his fist over his heart in a salute and bowed. “Always, Your Highness.”

Ignis shook Cor’s hand next. “Mind that leg,” he said, and Cor nodded.

Prompto bypassed the handshake, opting to sling an arm around Cor’s shoulder instead. His camera appeared in his hand, held reversed, and he said to Cor, “Selfie!”

The first snap was probably terrible - Cor clearly had no idea what the word “selfie” meant - but he caught on and smiled at the camera in time for the second shot. Prompto let the camera dissolve back into the armory and he bounced away from Cor with a grin and a wave. “Take care, okay? You gotta become the Marshal so you can help me get into the Crownsguard.”

That got another grin from Cor, and what looked suspiciously like a bit of a blush. “Sure thing.” He pulled the photo Prompto had given him that morning out of his pocket and held it up. “Thanks for this.”

“Anytime,” Prompto said.

Gladio was last, stepping forward to clasp Cor’s hand like Noctis had. “Take care of yourself, kid. Don’t go losing any more swords.”

Cor snorted, then said suddenly, “Oh! That reminds me.” He unbuckled the Genji Blade from his hip and handed it back to Gladio.

“You ain’t gonna keep it?” Gladio asked, clearly surprised.

Cor shook his head and tapped the pocket where he’d put Prompto’s photo. “This makes a better souvenir.”

“Heh.” Gladio’s expression was a mix of fond and proud, and the blush that hadn’t quite faded from Cor’s cheeks deepened as Gladio saluted him. “See you in a few years, Marshal.”

“You got it,” Cor said, and returned the salute.

“I think it’s about to happen,” Noctis said. The magic of the ruin had built up to an almost painfully intense level, and the scar on his back throbbed in time with the lighting on the walls. “Guys, c’mon.”

As his friends circled around him, he looked past them at Cor, standing alone on the other side of the room. He still looked frighteningly young, but he stood tall, fist still over his heart as he watched them.

Magic pulsed, and Noctis pulled his friends close, leaning into the space between spaces that was warping. It was harder to do with another person, even harder with three other people, and when the world re-solidified around them, a throbbing headache hit Noct and he staggered. Gladio caught him, hooking an arm around his shoulders to keep him upright, and Noctis leaned on him gratefully.

“Did it work?” Prompto asked in a whisper.

Noctis squinted over at the spot where Cor had been standing, now empty. “I think so,” he said.

Then a deep voice behind them said, “Looks like.”

They all spun around, though Noctis nearly lost his balance and had to lean on Gladio again. Marshal Cor Leonis stood in the far corner of the room, forty-five years old and solemn once more. “Your Highness,” he said. “It’s good to be back.”

“Glad you made it,” Noctis managed. He closed his eyes for a second, focusing on pushing away the ruin’s magic once more. “You were in the past?” he asked when he opened his eyes again. “With my dad?”

The Marshal nodded. “It was… quite the experience,” he admitted. “Did you figure out what happened?”

Noctis nodded. “We had a young Cor from their timeline here with us. What happened to you?”

“As best we could figure out, the Imperials managed to activate this ruin somehow, and it linked to the point in time in the other timeline when Regis activated theirs,” Cor answered. “Everything living got pulled through except for Regis and Clarus, who were mid-warp. We spent the last couple of days killing Niffs and trying to figure out how to re-activate the ruin to send me back.”

“We’re glad you made it,” Ignis said.

“Yeah,” Gladio agreed. “I used to think my dad was exaggerating about how much of a spitfire you were as a kid.”

The Marshal actually burst out laughing, which for a bizarre second made him look like his teenage self. “Oh, I can imagine. I was… definitely not as mature as I thought I was, when I was sixteen.”

Noctis grinned back. “You did okay. Kid-you landed the killing blow on that jabberwock they were fighting.”

“Yeah?” The Marshal gestured toward the door. “How ‘bout we get out of here, and you tell me all about it?”

“Right,” Noctis agreed. He was more than ready to put this ruin and its weird magic behind them. Maybe someday, after they’d won the war, they could revisit it, see if they could use the Solheim magitek somehow. But for now, he just wanted to get back to the haven. Tomorrow they’d return to Cape Caem, and the day after that, they’d leave for Altissia. Noctis would make the covenant with Leviathan and rescue Luna, then together they’d retrieve the Crystal and kick the Niffs out of Lucis and destroy the daemons.

And in an alternate timeline, a sixteen-year-old Cor would work with Noctis’s dad to make sure this didn’t happen to anyone else.

Noctis nodded to himself as he followed Cor and the others up the big spiral hallway. It was a tall order, but they could handle it. He had his friends, and the Marshal was back, and together they could tackle anything.


	7. Chapter 7

Cor didn’t remember the time-travel being quite this nauseating the first time around, but then again he’d been busy getting buried under a ton of stone, so maybe he’d had other things to worry about. When reality snapped back into place, his gut twisted and he staggered, but his bad leg gave out and he hit the ground hard, struggling to focus.

Then a familiar voice yelled, “Cor!”

Clarus dropped to his knees beside Cor, Regis half a second behind him. Relief swelled in Cor’s chest - they looked dusty and Clarus had some new bruises on his arms, but they were otherwise unharmed. They were fine, they’d survived the collapse of the ceiling and the unexpected influx of Niffs from the future, they were _okay—_

Then Regis caught Cor in a fierce hug. “You’re alive,” he whispered. “You’re alive…!” His voice cracked and he blew out a relieved breath. “We thought—the cave-in—”

“I’m fine,” Cor said, though his voice was muffled from being squished against Regis’s chest. He squirmed free, only for Clarus to embrace him in turn. “I’m _fine!_ ” he protested.

Regis laughed. “Of course you are,” he said, and smiled at him. “You’re too stubborn to die in a cave-in.”

“You know it,” Cor agreed. He elbowed Clarus in the ribs to make him let go. “Was future-me here?”

“He was.” Regis shook his head even as he shifted to sit more comfortably next to Cor. “And believe me when I say future-you is terrifying.”

Cor grinned. “They showed me pictures. I look _badass!_ ”

“They who?” Clarus asked.

“Oh!” Cor waved his hands. “You aren’t gonna believe this, but I met your kids!”

Their eyes widened. Regis said, “Marshal Leonis mentioned our children. You _met_ them?”

Cor nodded and pulled Prompto’s photo out of his pocket. “Look, here. That one’s yours—” tapping Noctis— “and those two are Clarus’s.” He touched Gladio and Iris.

“He looks like Aulea,” Clarus said, and smirked at Regis, who was turning a deeper shade of red than Cor had ever seen him.

“Sounds like her, too,” Cor added helpfully. “‘Specially when he laughs.”

“Oh,” Regis said, and ran a hand through his hair, clearly flustered. “Well then. I suppose… Er.”

Clarus laughed and reached around Cor to clap Regis on the back. “Everyone else has known it for years, my friend. You’ve never looked at another woman the way you look at her.”

Regis’s mouth opened and closed, but he clearly had no retort to that. Clarus winked at him, then looked back at the photo. “I’m not sure if I should be proud or concerned that my son already has that many scars,” he admitted. “...Or that my daughter is wearing that skirt.”

“Proud,” Cor said. “He got those scars from defeating Gilgamesh.”

Clarus’s eyebrows shot up. “He did?”

Cor nodded. “Your daughter’s pretty strong, too. Noctis said she can kick an MT into the ground.”

“Good,” Clarus said, then added fondly, “Cid’s looking good, for an old coot.”

“He’s still a cranky old bastard,” Cor said, then looked up at Regis. “I dunno what future-me told you about how the future goes, but—”

“He said enough,” Regis said grimly. “I take it Cid told you?”

“They all did,” Cor said. “I’ll tell you everything they told me. I promised Cid we wouldn’t let it happen in our timeline.”

Regis closed his eyes for a moment, looking pained; Cor guessed he was thinking about whatever argument he’d had with Cid that had led them to not speak to each other. Then Regis sighed and opened his eyes again. “I should start by reaching back out to him,” he said quietly.

“Yeah,” Cor said. “How about we get outta here so you can do that? I can tell you everything on the way.”

“Right,” Regis said. He pushed himself to his feet and dusted off his pants. “Let’s get going.”

Cor was about to stand up as well when Clarus gripped his arm, staring at the photo once more. Cor frowned, about to ask him what he was on about, when he realized where Clarus was looking. His heart sank. _Ah, shit._

“Cor…” Clarus said. “Are you wearing _chocobo-print_ pajama pants?”


End file.
